My firefox was using 967MB of RAM last night

[Tool_of_the_Conspiracy]

@Gaudere

Wow, thanks for the tip about the FF optimizer. Now my adobe products can be my big resource hogs, not my browser–as it should be!

You must not be running any Norton products. On my work computer, the virus scanner uses more than five times as many clock cycles as the applications that I actually use for my job. Also, the IT department has it scheduled to run at 12:15 pm each day, which happens to be about the same time that I’m pushing the computer hardest. My second-biggest CPU hog is SQL Server, which I don’t use either.

Closer to being on-topic: if you open a few tabs to garish MySpace pages, that could bump your RAM and CPU numbers to new heights.

[iamthewalrus_3]

@Shagnasty

Firefox starts off nice and streamlined when you first install it. This is to try and make a really good impression which it usually does. Its AI gets more and more bold over time as it tries to feel for your limits as to hour many resources it can consume undetected. Most people aren’t savvy enough to ever notice and Firefox just keeps going. Once it reaches a certain point, it installs itself AS your operating system. All you can do after that point is to use Firefox as your only application. It deletes the rest of them and even low-level hard drive formatting won’t overcome it. The only recourse is to buy a new computer and emoliate the old one BEFORE you bring the new one into the house. No one knows exactly Firefox is trying to do but many scientists suspect it is warning extraterrestrials about the SETI project and was, in fact, planted for that purpose.

The Mozilla foundation is formed in 1998. Firefox is brought online on September 23, 2002. Human decisions are removed from web browsing and caching. Firefox begins to allocate memory at a geometric rate. It overflows the swap partition on March 19 2:25 pm, Pacific Time. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

[Baron_Greenback]

@cochrane

It seems to work pretty well. The application itself uses about 1700 K of memory, but the Firefox memory usage dropped by a factor of 25 fold. I was running about 239 MB of memory previously. Now, Firefox runs at a high of about 9000 - 10,000 K without even needing to restart my browser. A huge difference.

I’d be wary of using this to be honest. All it does is dump - every five seconds - the inactive pages from fast RAM into slow virtual memory, regardless of the RAM resource available. That’s got to slow things down. If RAM is tight Firefox will page out as needed anyway.

[hekk]

@Struan

I’d be wary of using this to be honest. All it does is dump - every five seconds - the inactive pages from fast RAM into slow virtual memory, regardless of the RAM resource available. That’s got to slow things down. If RAM is tight Firefox will page out as needed anyway.

This is exactly what it does, and it makes Firefox balls slow. I don’t like it.

[Man_With_a_Cat]

I haven’t noticed it any slower than before. Normally, I only have 4-5 tabs open at a time. For kicks this afternoon, after installing it, I opened tab after tab, and no issues.

But if I seem this happen, I suppose it uninstalls as simply as it installed, right?

[cochrane]

@Mr Bus Guy

I haven’t noticed it any slower than before. Normally, I only have 4-5 tabs open at a time. For kicks this afternoon, after installing it, I opened tab after tab, and no issues.

But if I seem this happen, I suppose it uninstalls as simply as it installed, right?

No problem. Or you could shut it off. Just right-click the icon in the task box near the clock and select “quit.”

[BlackKnight]

There are a couple of reasons why Firefox 2 takes up huge amounts of memory. The major reason is that it caches pages (for the “Back / Forward” buttons) for a long time and isn’t too picky about how much memory it uses to do this. Another reason is that it keeps both a compressed and uncompressed version of images in memory. If you’ve got a tab open in the background that contains a bunch of images, then uncompressed versions of those images will remain in memory even if you haven’t viewed that tab for a long time.

I haven’t used Firefox 3 yet myself, but the reviews of the Betas all agree that memory usage is greatly improved. They’ve changed things so that much of the cache will “expire” if not used after a set time. This includes the uncompressed versions of images. In fact, Firefox 3 Beta 4 uses less memory than either IE7 or Opera: (Link to Graph)

This is particularly interesting because Opera, which has a reputation for staying trim and efficient, has been popular in the mobile market. With a streamlined memory footprint, it’s possible that Firefox could be a real challenger in that area in the future.

Also of interest - a blog by one of the developers:
http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

Firefox 2 does increase its memory usage the longer it is running. But just closing it and restarting every few hours will release all that memory, and it will restart with a reasonable memory usage.

The “Session Restore” add on for Firefox makes this easier. It restores all your webpages & tabs when Firefox is restarted. So when you notice that things are getting slow, you just kill Firefox via the X button in the upper right corner, and then restart it again. It will come back with all your pages reopened in tabs, but taking a much smaller amount of memory.

I am eagerly awaiting the release of Firefox version 3, which from all reports is much better on memory usage.