Seems to happen after a sustained period of running continuously with a lot of accumulated open tabs/pages. Anyone else seeing this? Any upgrades currently scheduled for 4.0?
I am dedicated to not moving backward, but this Firefox 4.0 for is not ready for prime time. Mine locks up all the time. I have plenty of memory, but I can see that the memory usage just grows and grows. There seems to be no upper limit to the leakage. Google for it and you will see how many people are having this problem. There is a quick and easy work around for the memory use. That involves clearing the memory when minimized. You can then occasionally minimize and restore to get all the memory back. Two clicks and done. Even correcting for the memory, the bugs are ubiquitous. It still locks up. I keep checking for further updates. They must be tearing their hair out at Mozilla over what they spawned and how they ever could have released it in the present form. How could it have been tested?
Try just typing “about:memory” in the address bar. If that also brings the memory back down, please report it either here or to Mozilla. Not because it’s necessarily a better solution, but because I may know which bug you are dealing with. It doesn’t seem like it can be fixed until Firefox 5 (which should be out in a couple months).
Whether it is that bug or not, you may find the Memory Fox addon helpful. It attempts to do what you are doing manually. It dumps the memory every few minutes (you can tweak how often.)
I say “attempts” because it is still a beta version, and some people seem to find that it doesn’t work for them.
First thing to try when Firefox becomes unstable is to reinstall with a completely clean Profile. I have to say that I’ve found FF4 as steady as a rock and I’ve been using it since the first Release Candidate.
That looks promising, but too new for me. I didn’t like the reviews. As an aside, I jumped to Firefox 4 because the previous version would not play YouTube videos. Always seems to be something going on.
Firefox 4.0 is what prompted me to switch to Chrome and never look back. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better. I had suffered for way too long w/ Firefox.
Thanks, I’m going to try that out. 
Did you have a chance to try out the about:memory thing I mentioned?
And, yeah, I know about the flash problems with 3.6. I actually know a workaround if you ever decide to go back to it: go to about:config and change dom.ipc.plugins.enabled and dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npswf32.dll to false. If necessary, then reinstall Flash.
Did you start from a clean profile for Firefox 4, BTW? If you were having problem with 3.6, then a clean profile is advised. I personally am pushing for that to be an option offered during install, but, for now, it means uninstalling Firefox 3.6 and choosing to remove personal information, all before installing Firefox 4.
And Chrome still needs proper zoom controls, at the very least. It would also be nice to not have to create a new addon to get an RSS feed in button form, but that’s less essential.
I’m chiming in because I’ve got similar problems with a massive memory use by Firefox 4.0 when working with >30 tabs. Did I understand you right that typing “about:memory” alone should flush the memory? Because when I do, all I get is a detailed view of FF’s memory usage, but none of it is dumped by using this command.
Holy crap, already? Firefox 3 was out for three years, and FF4 only lasts a few months?
Yep. From 4.0 onwards, Firefox is going to release frequent updates. Firefox 5,6 and 7 are all planned for 2011.
Oops. Wrote this last night and forgot to submit it.
Sorta. It activates garbage collection before it shows you the memory contents. For some reason, the automatic garbage collection doesn’t activate when the program is not in use. But it does activate when using “about:memory”.
Garbage collection is not really memory dumping or flushing, though. It’s analogous to going through and throwing away all you trash, but leaving what you are already using. Dumping or flushing imply getting rid of everything in memory and starting anew. Still, cleaning up the trash does release more memory. The memory usage should go down if you are encountering the bug I mentioned.
If that is not working, then there are more questions. Is the memory use static, or does it increase without you doing anything? Does it stay high as you close the tabs you aren’t using?
Heck, how high is it? I usually coast around 800Mb or so with that many tabs, and that’s with just basic, non-Flash tabs. (Flash causes a lot of memory problems, actually.) That’s higher than they claim, but I find it to be typical.
Yip. It’s a new numbering system. It’s an outward indication of them changing how development works. No more big releases that break everything. No more 12 months between development and release. And no more working on one version at a time.
That last part may sound weird. You see, they now start Firefox 5, then, after 6 weeks, it is frozen. No more changes can be made in 5–they all go in Firefox 6. Firefox 5 is then moved to fine tuning and then later testing. Later 6 is frozen, and then all new stuff goes in 7, and so on. It’s an effort to shorten the time between development and release. There’s always something new coming out just around the corner.
Right now, Firefox 5.0a2 and 6.0a1 are both out.
It’s static when I do nothing, but if I open additional tabs, it increases and stays high after closing these tabs.
Yep, it’s in that ballpark, but I’ve encountered a memory usage of even 1.3 GB when having opened more tabs with flash content.
Some more data points:
The other day, I had some active downloads and one main window with multiple tabs running. I closed the main window in order to free memory, so only the download window stayed open, but FF nonetheless didn’t release one byte of memory. And when I close FF entirely, in task manager I can watch the memory usage slowly count down until the process is finally terminated after at least about a minute.