Is my Firefox's Memory Usage Leaking?

[A.K.R.]

I do't know why, but Firefox seems to consume a lot of memory on my computer. Any ideas why?

I have 4 Firefox extensions installed, by the way, and I also use a lot of tabs while browsing (right now, I have 8 tabs open, but I sometimes open more than 10 tabs.

p.s. Here's a screenshot of Task Manager showing the amount of memory and CPU cycles Firefox is using. The one on the left is when I started it, the one on the right is more or less the amount of memory it is using right now.

[AcdShdw]

my firefox uses up 32, how much does yours, also doesnt matter to me cause i ahve over a gig of ram,

edit : so now theirs a pic, well the seocnd one looks like mine normally

[A.K.R.]

my firefox uses up 32, how much does yours, also doesnt matter to me cause i ahve over a gig of ram

I attached a screenshot of task manager. Check it.

[AcdShdw]

does it flair up with memory after adding more tabs?

[Takaras]

33 MB

A minimize and restore brought it down to 16 MB. I expect it to go higher.

There are memory leaks in the program, I'm sure.

[AcdShdw]

woah your right, i minimize it and it goes to less than 1mb around 900k!!, from 41 (which its at now) down to 900k!!

[A.K.R.]

I also have noticed that. When you minimise it, the memory usage falls, rather sharply.

[newdles]

Well, I've got 1 gigabyte of ram so that's not a problem. If I need more, just couple miles down the road and I can have some :)

Anyway, I leave my pc on 24/7 generally and have between 3 and 7 tabs open at all times in Firefox.

Here is my task manager. It uses quite a bit but I also have the disk cache set to 1000 megabytes.

Edit - by the way, the reason the memory usage drops when you minimize it is the same way most every program is setup. Memory utilization in that way makes it better so that you can be running say Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, and 3/4 other things intensively on a machine with only 256 mb of memory. All you'd have to do is minimize all the programs you're not using (because you literally can only use one program at a time) and have most of your leftover memory spare for the active program.

[Veedems Veteran]

Anytime you minimize any app, the memory useage goes down drastically

[FM]

You blurred your XP Username? :rofl:

[AcdShdw]

my username is down, heh not like it matters... lol

[Takaras]

I first post only intended to show that there does seem to be a memory leak. On a side note I can get memory usage up to about 285 MB before firefox crashes on me. I think it was roughly 135 new windows.

[Steffan]

are you using the stable (.9.3) build or the nightly builds?

[A.K.R.]

You blurred your XP Username? :rofl:

Don't go off-topic. I did it to protect my privacy.

Well, I've got 1 gigabyte of ram so that's not a problem.  If I need more, just couple miles down the road and I can have some :)

Anyway, I leave my pc on 24/7 generally and have between 3 and 7 tabs open at all times in Firefox.

Here is my task manager.  It uses quite a bit but I also have the disk cache set to 1000 megabytes.

http://www.graphics-tech.com/storage/task_mgr.jpg

Edit - by the way, the reason the memory usage drops when you minimize it is the same way most every program is setup.  Memory utilization in that way makes it better so that you can be running say Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, and 3/4 other things intensively on a machine with only 256 mb of memory.  All you'd have to do is minimize all the programs you're not using (because you literally can only use one program at a time) and have most of your leftover memory spare for the active program.

Yours use so much memory :| ? By the way, I have 512MB of memory here.

What's the normal amount of memory usage for you people here anyway (don't respond if you are using the nightly (unstable) builds)?

By the way, here's a screenshot of Task Manager showing how much memory Firefox is using now. I added some more columns for more information. Firefox version: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3; 9 tabs open; 4 extensions installed; using default Firefox theme.

Edited August 29, 2004 by A.K.R.

[pHuzi0n]

A program is using 1/16th of your memory and you've got a problem with it? Seriously man, unless it's using more memory than you have then wtf does it matter.

[Ambience]

You think having 30mb or so used up by Firefox on a laptop with 256mb ram is a problem? (that's my pc)

[Zaic]

it depends on what you're doing with firefox i believe IE would utilize same amount of RAM too

[A.K.R.]

:| ... :s

[Fotix]

As somewhat of a side note:

Mozilla, Firefox, and all the apps based on it use dynamic memory allocation. It detects how much physical RAM you have, and calculates a percentage based on that as to how much of it it should use. That results in wildly varying memory usage from one machine to the next.

Anyhow, more discussion about future plans on changing this can be read here or the old bug# which is the memory allocation feature is here..

[Mike Douglas]

you have more than a gig of ram and you're worried about an extra 31mb?

[_R2D2]

Mine uses 34 with 3 tabs open. After minimize and restore it uses 11.

Version 0.9.2

[ThisSiteHasLostItsCharm]

imo firefox pretty unstable at the moment, i went to the bbc site to watch some videos of the games and they played fine but when i went to the same site/page on firefox it took longer to load and crashed the browser on plugin load ;)

still i use firefox as my main browser and ie for wu. just thought i'd share my opinion.

[insanekiwi]

firefox sometimes uses upto 60mb on my machine.

[supernova_00]

imo firefox pretty unstable at the moment, i went to the bbc site to watch some videos of the games and they played fine but when i went to the same site/page on firefox it took longer to load and crashed the browser on plugin load ;)

still i use firefox as my main browser and ie for wu. just thought i'd share my opinion.

the plugins are pretty screwy right now if your using a nightly just wait until the plugin manager is working correctly. anyways people need to stop bitchin about firefox since it's still in development. The memory useage is nothing bad, firefox caches really well and thats what it is, i can use up to 700mb of ram by going to a nasa site and opening up about 30 tabs of huge pics. now if i go from one page to say yahoo.com and then hit the back button the image would load like i'm on 50mbps connection because the image is cached.