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329 Comments
- syroncoda, on 11/14/2007, -22/+172i agree. firefox, while being a damn good browser compared to IE, is still sucking down my ram when i wanna do other stuff on my box. FIX MEMORY LEAK!
- vault, on 11/14/2007, -11/+120Not just Windows, it eats RAM on OS X as well.
- thushan, on 11/13/2007, -8/+78Right now i'm sitting on 985Mb (there's 4Gb on this x64 Vista box), with 4 windows and about 3-5 tabs in each window. Close the extra windows and close the remaining tabs (but still keep the process open) and the memory footprint doesnt budge.
"Parmenter attributes the problem to "memory fragmentation." Whatever it is, it can cause a PC to grind to such slow performance that sometimes it's just easier to "X" out of Firefox or reboot altogether."
I leave FF open for weeks at a time sometimes but using that much ram is insane. The History->Recently closed tab caching may be one culprit but surely Mozilla can profile the application and see where the allocator is fragmenting? I've tried safe-mode for a while but still the same deal. In either case I force exit and revisit my previous sites using SessionManager.
Flock on the other hand chewed up about 100Mb when it launches and climbs ever so quickly to 700 with about 10 tabs, not suprising as its built on top of FF.
I usually use Opera if i need to do debugging of sites now as the constant loading/refreshing seems to cause FF to grow too quickly. - thepxc, on 11/12/2007, -3/+55Same on Linux (every distro I've tried).
- Marijuana, on 11/13/2007, -7/+49I know it's blasphemous but FF has pissed me off numerous of times because of little mini freezes here and there.
- str3ama, on 11/13/2007, -14/+50The first real build was really amazing, and I think that was what got me and others using it. But now it's become way too resource hungry, and it makes it difficult to deploy firefox on other lower end machines as a result. I'm all for open source, but Opera blows the current browser competitors away. I still use firefox because I can't export my password/configuration to Opera - but Opera is infinitely more light-weight, and has lots of addons, is standards compliant (it demands compliancy, meaning designers have to be less sloppy with code soup).
It's a great browser that's years ahead of IE, Firefox and Safari - it's also feature rich from installation (comes up with a blocking tool - which is a bit weak atm, mouse gestures, multi-tab browsing, javascript/flash blocker). It's got a few more, but those are what I can recall.. - Giga, on 11/12/2007, -4/+40It's not all cache. If it was, Mozilla wouldn't be flummoxed by their own design choice.
- h0zae, on 11/13/2007, -11/+47and it is only getting slower and less stable
- gfunk84, on 11/14/2007, -14/+48Why the hell do you find the need to leave the program running for weeks at a time? I'm not trying to deny there's an issue, but is it that difficult to close the program and open it again once in a while?
- thushan, on 11/12/2007, -1/+32Work!!! Whats wrong with leaving an application open for exceeding amounts of time? We have Visual Studio, Eclipse IDE's running for alot longer.
>is it that difficult to close the program and open it again once in a while?
We use Zimbra at work (as well as Thunderbird+IMAP), so lots of windows with email conversations open. I use SessionManager which works nicely to restore the previous state back (and yet manages to keep the memory footprint lower!)
Dont get me wrong, I love Firefox but I've learnt to live with or workaround the memory issues. - zeromancer, on 11/13/2007, -1/+31what the *****. did i just see a linux, a windows, and a mac user agree on something....
the apocalypse is nigh. - spiffytech, on 11/12/2007, -9/+3340 tabs in Opera isn't a problem.
/Obligatory fanboy-ism - Chewie67, on 11/13/2007, -6/+29This is the one MAJOR flaw in Firefox. I use it every day, and it's the one thing that drives me nuts.
If they can fix this in 3.0, and hopefully reduce the bloat a bit, that would be great. - Y0tsuya, on 11/12/2007, -4/+26Can't do that on a mobile phone. The only reason they're getting off their duffs to address this problem is because they're trying to expand into mobile phones.
- clouserw, on 11/13/2007, -6/+28New ideas about improving RAM usage are here: http://www.pavlov.net/blog/archives/2007/11/memory ...
- luchid, on 11/13/2007, -5/+26IE is also not standards-compliant, insecure, unstable...
- Scatropolis, on 11/12/2007, -9/+29You know what I do when I need a lot of my RAM......CLOSE FIREFOX. That usually fixes the memory issue.
- Dundasbro, on 11/12/2007, -0/+19Whoah, I thought we had driven people like you off the internet?
- MikeCerm, on 11/12/2007, -0/+19You can set your cache to zero, and Firefox will still eat up all the available memory.
- inactive, on 11/12/2007, -0/+18...
Are you possessed? - bubba9999, on 11/13/2007, -0/+18Mine's never been over about 200mb, no matter how many tabs I have open or how long it's been open. The one I'm writing this in has been open continuously for over a week, had 20-30 tabs open in it, and is currently chewing up 158mb.
- Sushubh, on 11/12/2007, -4/+21Opera does the same thing without munching all of your RAM...
- inactive, on 11/12/2007, -3/+20I love Firefox but we have to digg this article up to make the Mozilla foundation notice that there _really_ is a problem with the memory usage in Firefox. They just seem to be lazy about it. Time to get over this issue!
- shethinkmefunny, on 11/12/2007, -0/+16You could always try just spelling things right in the first place....
- Scatropolis, on 11/12/2007, -1/+17but that's the magic of open source.....you can fix it yourself.
- bblande, on 11/14/2007, -4/+20The memory leak is inexcusable. I paid good money for Firefox.
Oh....wait. *****. - PueSi, on 11/13/2007, -0/+15For me FF freezes when loading Digg comments and Flash videos, it's really annoying since when a tab is refreshing in the background and the page you're watching suddenly freezes.
- snugglebear, on 11/12/2007, -2/+16Thats my problem too. It never releases the memory it claims. If I have google calendar, gmail and a couple other 'big' pages open it brings up my firefox memory usage, and even when I close them it keeps it.
- inactive, on 11/12/2007, -0/+13I have three
- Dumbledorito, on 11/13/2007, -0/+132, 4, or 40. Firefox doesn't care.
And I want Firefox over IE. I love the plugins and hate IE's layout, but I leave tabs and windows open for later reference or because they have audio players or whatever, and that eventually results in RAM suckage. - VenTatsu, on 11/12/2007, -0/+13I call bull *****. Distros have been known to ship programs that are broken in one why or another from time to time. With the various distributions tweaking FF to 'fit in' with their install system, or with their software ideology, or just picking different optimization flags when they compile it it's next to impossible to claim that each distributions own packaged FF will match the behavior of the stock FF.
- inactive, on 11/14/2007, -21/+33Bury this down. First, it's not even an article, it's comment length and I'm getting really sick of things one paragraph long getting attention on Digg. Second, Firefox runs just fine if you avoid a lot of extensions and restart it once in a while. I NEVER have problems with it and I use multiple computers on multiple OSes. Yes Firefox does have some memory leaks. I've even built some test cases for Mozilla but this "memory problem" is getting way over-blown. Half these people complaining are bothered by poorly-coded EXTENSIONS, not Firefox itself. The other half should just restart the brower at least once a week until Firefox 3 comes out.
- wolferz, on 11/12/2007, -0/+12Photoshop, Quickbooks, Winamp, Zoom Media Player, and Nero are all examples of programs which deal with considerably larger amounts of data at any given time and yet use the same or significantly less ram. What on earth is Firefox "caching" that takes 90 megs of ram per tab. The cache Firefox keeps of recently visited pages in ram is not useful enough to take up 90 megs of ram per tab plus 100 megs for firefox itself. It would take more than ten web pages do not account for 90 megs of ram and I don't need 10 previous webpages to appear instantly when I hit back. The odds of me hitting back 10 times in a row is around 1 in 1,000. I have a 500 gig hard drive and thats why Firefox has a cache folder on afore mentioned 500 gig hard drive. 15-20 megs per tab is reasonable, 90 is not. I can live with an extra half of a second to load the webpage from the hard drive instead of ram.
Oh and its not extensions that push ram usage up ether, all of this is based on Firefox 2.0.0.9 with no extensions installed.
Considering the PER TAB ram usage for Firefox how many tabs are open has little relevance on whether or not Firefox is using too much ram.
Firefox bugs would only be relevant if this wasn't consistent since the release of Firefox 2.0 and has not gotten better despite countless coders looking at the Firefox code to fix bugs.
Oh and to bring all this together, Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 on this same system uses about 20 megs of ram for each additional tab and 80 for the first one yet is FASTER than Firefox 2.0.0.9 when going back to previously visited pages. In case you missed that let me just say this tid-bit blows your "its cache which makes it ok" theory out of the water. - MrSpontaneous, on 11/12/2007, -4/+16I'm running 3.0 beta 1 and I can say the entire browser seems snappier. Its also using a considerably less amount of memory than ff2 did. It seems as if Mozilla's frantic memory leak tracking is starting to pay off...
- jikai55, on 11/12/2007, -1/+12First and probably last time I will hear 'Appetite' and 'Flummoxed' in the same sentence.
- LuTze, on 11/13/2007, -1/+11I won't switch to opera until it has really good extensions. People who recommend Opera don't seem to realize most users who use Firefox can't switch because of the addictive nature of extensions. And everyone has their own subset of extensions that they can't live without it's practically the same problem of asking a Windows user to switch to Linux and s/he finds at least one program that does not have an exact match. For me the most important extension is SwitchProxy. It allows proxy changes in two clicks. If I remember right it takes about seven clicks in IE7 and it used to be a similarly high number in Opera when I last used it. Now most people might not care about this but for people in academics who need to use their library'sproxy every once in a while to access restricted journals, etc., this is pretty much indispensable. For someone else, something like GeckoTIP that allows Tablet Input might essential and so on.
- comrade693, on 11/12/2007, -0/+10No, the reason why we are working on this is because it's one of the goals for Gecko1.9/Firefox3. The mobile phone stuff isn't happening until moz2.
- Hyperion1144, on 11/13/2007, -0/+10I am running 2 windows, 24 open tabs, and 19 extensions. Currently sitting at 200 megs of memory usage on XP Pro SP2. Not great, but not terrible. I only have a gig of memory on what is admittedly a not-very-new-comp and I rarely have issues with Firefox; and I am a tabbed browsing freak (24 tabs is a little lower than my average). Is Firefox memory usage worse under Vista? It doesn't seem to be a huge problem to me. Problem, maybe; but not a huge one from where I am sitting.
- bruenig, on 11/12/2007, -2/+12Yeah and when you maximize it, it all comes back. What a fix, if only I could learn how to browse while ff is minimized.
- stockjones, on 11/13/2007, -7/+16I like Firefox for the great developer add ons like firebug, but Opera is SO much faster and less resource intensive. I would highly recommend the Opera folks to look into an add on similiar to firebug and other slick developer tools because thats really the only thing that makes me use Firefox over Opera. I also prefer the Firefox menu over Opera, but I do like a lot of the unique features in Opera.
- inactive, on 11/12/2007, -1/+9That's awesome, but most of us don't have 20 gigs of RAM just sitting around. I mean, during this session I've visited only 5 pages including this one, and I'm already at 100 megs physical RAM and 800 megs virtual. It's insane.
- vault, on 11/13/2007, -2/+10I've tried Opera, just seems very alien to me. Hard to explain- I love using new apps but every time I've tried to use Opera I leave frustrated.
Been a while since the last time, should really try it again if Firefox 3 doesn't live up to my hopes. - superyounan1, on 11/12/2007, -0/+7if you're using linux, theres a modified version of firefox called swiftfox that is just phenomenal, the difference on my computer is dramatic. An interesting thing about it is that there's a different version of swiftfox compiled for specific processors, each optimized specifically for your cpu. I don't mean this to be a snobbish linux post, just a suggestion that i want to share. I don't know why he hasn't ported swiftfox for windows, and people are annoyed by how he doesn't make the optimizations available for firefox to adopt, but if you're more pragmatic than idealistic, get swiftfox for linux, its fantastic.
http://getswiftfox.com/ - vdog, on 11/12/2007, -1/+8Why is he being dugg down? They've found a major part of the problem, now they can find ways to fix it.
- afx1, on 11/14/2007, -2/+9But it comes with a free frogurt!
- SteveMax, on 11/12/2007, -0/+7He's saying that it is possible to implement this feature without sucking all your RAM, which is very pertinent. This means that either Mozilla's implementation is flawed (maybe it caches the whole page in RAM, not just the references it needs to rebuild that page either from a new download or from the disk cache?), or this isn't the problem with Firefox.
- shethinkmefunny, on 11/14/2007, -1/+8yeah but the frogurt is cursed, and the toppings contain potassium benzoate.
...that's bad - cphelps, on 11/14/2007, -0/+7It'll be working even better when your computer is ridden with spyware and other junk.
- nonymous666, on 11/12/2007, -0/+6want a cookie?
- colincornaby, on 11/12/2007, -0/+6I really doubt you're using 43k of memory. Firefox takes up more than that without any web pages open.
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