this might not be the place to ask–but i figure most of you know a lot about most things, and i don’t want to go join some mozilla forum.
what causes Mozilla tabbed web browsing to eat memory up to 2,205,726K? (last crash). right now it’s running at 1,226, 334, sluggishly.
i have disabled almost all plug ins, and the plug in container is running at 5,000k.
what is the deal? i have tried all the general things mozilla claims will help, updating or disabling plugins, limiting values in the about:config, and have my downloads cleared out.
it used to run really light. now it crashes literally every browsing session sooner or later.
You can try memory fox which says it reclaims memory. I didn’t see a huge difference but I didn’t really use it for very long or do a controlled test. There’s also memory restart which simplifies the restart process.
Other utilities like Process Lasso let you trim virtual memory but it won’t affect commit memory and I don’t know if the option works in the free version.
any clue what causes the smorgasbord? i was sick of ie7 crashing so i got hooked on FF. at first, it ran extremely light…but over the last few months, it just eats all the memory. starting out blank, it’s running at around 202,000k and grows from there really quickly. i have ie8 now and runs really light by comparison, but i hate HATE the interface and do not want to jump back.
i see a ton of similar complaints and indications this is an ongoing and annoying constant with FF.
come to think of it, i believe FF auto updated and that’s when this all started.
Have you tried clearing your history? On my older computer, Firefox became unusable from nothing other than the accrued history items every few weeks. I’d clear it and it’d be fast again – for a while.
Otherwise, why not give Chrome a try? Lighter and faster than FF.
That’s astonishingly high memory usage. I’ve been using Firefox for years and I’ve never known it to eat memory at that rate, even in the bad old days of FF1 and 2. I have 12 tabs open at the moment, including a YT video, and FF is using 279, 140 K. (The plugin container and Flash Player plugin are using 88, 308.)
i’ll try some of these things and give it a day. i just cleared absolutely everything and killed the process. i’m already back up to 400,000k right now but i’ll watch it and see. i think my next step will be uninstalling/reinstalling. will i need to save my bookmarks someplace to keep them if i do that?
I run with 16gig of ram and don’t generally notice FF slowing down until usage gets around 2gig. I just restart it when it becomes an issue and assume that in my case it’s due to all of the plug-ins that I run plus the fact that I use tab mix plus to automatically reload certain tabs - I usually have about 40-50 open.
It’s not really a major PITA for me and the benefits I get from the plugins far outweigh any of the issues that I have so I wouldn’t even consider something like chrome. It may support some plug-ins but FF is still the leader by far as far as that goes.
I was going to open a MPSIMS thread about this subject, but then I found this one.
It looks like the latest version of Firefox (17.0.1) has finally stopped the memory leaks! I am actually a little afraid to type that out because I am afraid of being jinxed.
It is refreshing after years of dealing with the slow creep of memory use. Sure its memory imprint would start small, but it would just take and take and never give back. I almost never restart my system, so Firefox would always be there slowly sucking up the RAM. I had to install a restart Firefox add-on button just to make it periodically flush its stash.
I have the been watching the memory use for a couple days now. I have opened new windows, created and closed many tabs, played a whole lot of YouTube videos, and visited many Flash-intensive sites. While the memory use does go up, it now comes down as well and stays at fairly reasonable level.
I don’t know if the OP is still having problems or not, but here’s the answer if they are:
It’s a emory leak. While there was one that was found in the latest Firefox, it’s far more likely that it’s caused by a either one of your extensions or a corrupt profile. First try turning off your extensions entierely and see if the memory usage goes down. If it does, go through your extensions one by one and enable them until the problem happens–then you’ll know which one caused the problem.
If that doesn’t work, try going to the Help menu and clicking Support Information. In the tab that shows up, there will be a “Reset Firefox” button. Try that to reset your profile. You’ll then have to reinstall your extensions (although pretty much everything else will still be there.)
On my version ( 17.0.1 ), that would be the Troubleshooting Information option in the Help menu. The reset button is in the top right of the tab that comes up.
As a precaution, before I do anything as major as that in Firefox, I backup my bookmarks because they’re a pain to lose. Bookmarks tab - Show All Bookmarks - Import & Backup.
I haven’t had any problems with Firefox in over 18 months. It used to wipe out my profile every time it updated and I never figured out the issue. But that stopped at some point. Which is really good, because their update schedule is now about every three weeks instead of three times a year.
ETA: it’s too bad the OP wasn’t on Facebook long ago. Then all of his childhood memories would be preserved and out there for everyone to see. Even if he didn’t want them to.
