D.Pham4GLTE (>60GB)

I checked the Task Manager in Windows XP and noticed that FF is using 1 GB of memory...is this normal? Seems like a lot to me.

twikoff

yea, FF has always been notorious for having massive memory leaks
kill it and let it restart those same pages and it will be significantly less usage

Dr Mabuse

Twikoff is right, memory leaks are an issue. Close down and restart, even have it save your tabs.

Unless, of course, you run a lot of tabs open when you browse, then that kind of usage may be legit.

My Firefox is always using towards a gig of memory, if I have a ton of tabs open it goes a gig or more.

Jay G.

Note that it's not Firefox itself that usually is leaking, but one of the many various add-ons that get installed into Firefox. Flash is a big offender, although I've read that Google Toolbar has had massive memory holes too.

Unfortunately, since they all run from within Firefox, Windows Task Manager only sees that firefox.exe is eating up a lot of memory, so many people blame Firefox itself. Also, since Firefox's tabs are all threaded, even if the offending tab is closed, the memory isn't freed up. It can't regain that lost memory until Firefox is closed completely.

Google's Chrome attempted to adjust for this by creating a within-browser task manager to show what's specifically using up memory. It also opens each tab in a separate process, so that when an offending tab is closed, all the memory is regained instantly.

sniper308

I'd agree. I'm a heavy user of firefox, often have multiple people logged on to the main XP machine in the house, all who leave firefox open and running, and I've never seen any of the firefox processes on any of my machines take that kind of memory. And I have very few add ons.

The Bus

Use Chrome.

Groucho

1GB is not nearly enough. I always allocate 2GB or more to the program.

twikoff

1 great thing of IE8.. the tabs run as seperate processes.. so when there is an issue, i can find the offending tab, end process on it, let it recover on its own and continue on without disrupting the rest

mikehunt

I was going to suggest that setting in about:config that gets FF to release memory when minimized, but I just tried it and although it went from ~250MB down to 9MB right away, it quickly went back up to over 60MB with the window still minimized
although it's been restored for a few minutes now and is only at 87MB so that's not too bad I guess

Iron_Giant

I have seen the TAB if Firefox make the RAM for that process go through the roof, so I always keep an eye on it. If it is a problem, I copy the link, kill the process and then restart Firefox/IE (whichever I think I should use).

movieking

Rather than create a new Firefox thread, I figure this thread is close enough. My issue lately seems to be that when I open multiple tabs, it always looks like they are constantly loading in the tab titles at the top. I never noticed this before, but it doesn't seem to be limited to certain sites. While sometimes the sites have loaded fine, it often means that the page hasn't fully loaded, so I have to reload and hope it works. I've killed Firefox a few times to restart it because of the memory leak issue, and even did a complete reboot, and the problem remains. I've also updated to the latest version of Firefox, and it's made no difference. The problem doesn't seem to exist with IE, but since I prefer Firefox, I wanted to see if it was a Firefox issue or something with my computer.

Anyone else have this problem or is it just me?