After a few hours of steady usage of Firefox in Windows it begins eating up all of the RAM.They call this a feature:
What I think many people are talking about however with Firefox 1.5 is not really a memory leak at all. It is in fact a feature.
To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited < 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last few session history entries. This can be a lot of data. It’s a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web.
Screenshot taking from my work machine.
I feel that 475mb of memory usage is more ridiculous than a “feature” should be. However, I do not plan on leaving Firefox anytime soon. I currently use it on Windows, Mac and Linux. Sidenote, Outlook is awful too.
11 Comments
wow 475! 475+147=big stone. how come 475?
Many people say this is used to cache pages in the RAM making navigation back to pages you have already visited. While this may help Firefox run faster, the rest of the application I am running suffer. Even with 1.5gb the machine starts to get sluggish.
That was after I left Firefox running for a day or two on my day-job pc. I now shut it down every night. I don’t even run that many extensions on the work machine…
I also have this problem with Firefox (2.0), but it’s non-existent (or greatly alleviated to the point of irrelevance) in the pre-release versions of Firefox 3 that I’ve recently dabbled with. The fundamental changes that they’ve made to Firefox’s renderer (Gecko) in the last few years have helped things greatly, and they’re only now stabilized enough to merit inclusion in a non-dev product.
Hello Mr. Brown.
That is great news! Like I said, it doesn’t bother me enough to switch. I just have to shut it down more often. I don’t plan on switching browsers anytime soon.
Have you had any stability issues with FF 3?
I did have one page a while back that was pretty consistently crashing the browser, but all in all, it’s extraordinarily stable for being an alpha and much more stable than alphas of previous Firefox versions.
And while the crashes do occasionally happen, I recover from them pretty quickly with the “restore previous session” feature. They end up costing me less time than the extreme sluggishness of Firefox 2.
Thanks Greg. I may have to give the alpha a try. FF2 crashes pretty regularly on my Mac. That is typically only when I am coding a new site a troubleshooting some screwy code. I don’t have too many crashes on Windows.
Will, I’ve seen the memory usage shoot up to 190MB on my machine but 450MB is way too much. How many extensions and themes are you using? Can u list them out, I think I know what’s causing this gluttony.
I agree Manu, 450mb is way too much. I use Adblock Plus, Firebug, IE Tab, Nuke Anything Enhanced, Screen grab, Tab Mix Plus, and Tiny Menu on that specific pc. I do not use any themes.
First, Adblock Plus is a memory hog, chuk it, you are using Nuke Anything Enhanced which is better. Also check out the Problematic extensions list on MozillaZine.
You may also find reduce memory usage on Firefox? useful.
You could also try working using a new Firefox profile, backup your private data and restore in a new profile using MozBackup.
In my case these tips worked, now my memory usage is about 100MB.
Hi Will,
I was quite surprised to see that you don’t have the Web Developer. You have to try it out, I assure you that you’ll love it.
You should try Menu Editor in place of Tiny Menu. Menu Editor doesn’t let u create a new menu, rather it let’s you lighten up the existing menus, including the context menus.
Also use MR Tech Local Install. it’ll allow you to do things you never knew were even possible.
@Manu - Nuke Anything Enhanced doesn’t remove ads that I know of. I use it to remove data from webpages prior to taking screenshots of my companies internal systems.
I have Web Developer installed on my development machine and very rarely use it. I prefer Firebug.
I will check out the other links you suggested though. Thanks!