element14.wordpress.com — Even after at least hundreds of posts on digg.com, even after a Slashdot article there’s thousands of people out there complaining about the Firefox Memory Bug. Lets get it straight. It’s not a bug. It’s part of the cache feature. Here are some about:config hacks to make Firefox faster and use less RAM...
Oct 14, 2006 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountOct 15, 2006
Possible Solution To High Memory:I used windows task manager and noticed I had 80k mem usage. Then I went into "Tools" on the top of the Mozilla browser went to "Clear Private Data" and I deleted everything but "saved passwords". Then I existed from Mozilla Firefox, started it back and I was only using 20k then after opening 2 tabs and after 5 minutes it's only at 42k. Not bad, not bad at all. Clear your data on a consistent basis, it only takes half a second.
twangoOct 15, 2006
I usually have 5 or 6 tabs open, and FF is usually using about 50-100 MB under OS X ... now and then a little more.So I'm guessing that lots of Diggers are using Win? or else have many, many tabs open?
shrimpOct 16, 2006
I've experienced exactly the same. I often leave FF running for days on end (on simple text pages I'm using for reference or making my way through slowly), and it ends up eating hundreds of megabytes of memory simply sitting idle.You don't even need to be viewing multimedia-heavy pages.
negrogooseOct 16, 2006
Firefox should be updated with two options upon install:I am a:1. Normal User.2. Memory Bitch.
error401Oct 21, 2006
Firefox is fully garbage collected so the application isn't going to be freeing the memory to the OS immediately anyway. And FWIW, 60MB is pretty slim considering the functionality and the fact that the entire toolkit is reimplemented in the application for cross platform capability. It may be the case that 60MB is just the base footprint once all of the shared libraries have been pulled in, since the browser being started and displaying about:blank probably hasn't allocated anywhere near the memory it needs to actually do something useful.And besides, I would fully expect this behaviour. The whole point of the page *cache* is to *cache* pages that have been recently viewed. Just because you closed the tab doesn't necessarily invalidate the cache. This might not be the best choice, but it certainly is a valid one. It becomes even more valid with FF2's 'recently closed tabs' menu.My biggest beef with Mozilla apps' memory management (that seems to be fixed) is that they used to get paged out when minimized (especially Thunderbird). When I have 400MB free physical memory I don't expect to have to wait 10s for an app I minimized 5 minutes ago to restore itself. The only real *problem* I've been aware of is that the GC pretty much ensures that the entire application is resident all the time. I believe the app ran GC more often when minimized as well, which meant that even while minimized it couldn't be swapped out. I think this was fixed in 1.5, but using GC has some drawbacks as above.Anyway...
error401Oct 21, 2006
Grab 2RC2. Almost all of the actual memory leaks have been caught. I can now accidentally leave Horde open on my work workstation auto refreshing once a minute over the weekend and come back with a usable system. With 1.5 this would cause it to eat up like 600MB.Why don't you try fixing some of the weird circular reference issues that occur when you use garbage collection in an application? They are usually extremely difficult to track down and often more difficult to fix. Worse, the issues are complex enough that it's very difficult to predict them.
error401Oct 21, 2006
Perhaps a miniscule amount, but I doubt it. Pipelining is something like how it sounds - it works like this: each webpage has, say, 30 objects that need to be loaded to render it. In 'normal' mode (HTTP/1.0), the browser needs to establish a TCP connection and issue a request for *each* of those objects. It could make multiple connections at once, but must close them after each object is received. Pipelining simply keeps the connection open after the content has been served, ready to handle the next request that needs to be made. This has less of an effect on broadband links since latencies are much lower, so TCP setup time is pretty short - but on slow or long links it's definitely noticable. If your ping time to the server is like 300ms, the TCP connection setup will take about 450ms, so you'll be waiting that long for each object before you even start receiving any data. Since the actual data transmission doesn't depend much on latency (due to windowing in TCP), this time can often be pretty significant compared to the data transfer time.
jinexileOct 21, 2006
Trim on minimize is the ultimate placebo for memory whores.
ejvyasOct 22, 2006
I screwed my FF by using these TIPS!! It runs faster without them