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Firefox using up 1.5 gigs of RAM (screenshot)

flickr.com — Firefox was used for over a week and never restarted. Eventually it started to slow down, Reason: Firefox's memory usage had gone up to 1.5 gigs. This is why you should restart Windows everyday, folks.

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  • DarkStalker, on 10/12/2007, -19/+266It's a reason to restart Firefox. It's their famous memory leak that they've been working on for ages.
    • OUPablo, on 10/12/2007, -31/+48Yeah, i have always noticed a problem with firefox. If i leave it open overnight, it will climb up to about 50 MB. But, if you just close firefox everytime you're done looking at something, you'll never have any problems. Just a question: why would you leave it open for a week?
    • Rub3X, on 10/12/2007, -13/+155Yup I've always had this issue when leaving it open for a long period of time. Opera and IE7 release their memory when you minimize them, however firefox doesn't do this by default. You need to tweak it to release its memory. To do this, type about:config in the address bar. Right click add a new boolean name it config.trim_on_minimize set it to true restart firefox, and memory leak free.
    • mojaam, on 10/12/2007, -4/+209A faster way to reach that much memory usage is to spend just a few minutes on myspace.
    • pardonmedoug, on 10/12/2007, -6/+23anybody else on whether the above recommendation by Rub3X is a good idea? any particular reason not to do it?
    • furan, on 10/12/2007, -5/+41The above post is incorrect. This will cause the working set to be trimmed, meaning any leaked memory will be paged to disk. The operating system will do this over time anyway, if the memory is truely leaked and the pages it occupies are not being touched. So the memory is not so much being reclaimed as paged out to disk, meaning it will occupy the page file for the lifetime of the process (and keep accumulating there as the leaked pages are paged out to disk).
    • TiMMY8765, on 10/12/2007, -6/+19I was using an alpha build and it took up 900 MB after 2 hours
    • dnthomps, on 10/12/2007, -7/+40This is not just with Firefox folks. This is with Mozilla in general. I know some of you use Thunderbird. I have it close it out just so my damn fan won't spin off the damn motor almost every day. Memory gets taxed to 100%. Come on Mozilla. Fix the leaks please!
    • shinynew, on 10/12/2007, -14/+23it was the final reason for me to switch to opera. I may switch back to firefox when they fix it, but opera is acually very nice, even without all my extentions.
    • leobaby, on 10/12/2007, -41/+85This guy doesn't bother to list all of his extensions.

      Stupid ass crap. No ***** digg.
    • fudged71, on 10/12/2007, -9/+80but, c'mon... restart windows? what are you on!?
    • detonate, on 10/12/2007, -6/+34"if you just close firefox everytime you're done looking at something, you'll never have any problems."

      Haha but I'm never done looking at something...
    • skyshock21, on 10/12/2007, -26/+43"Working on it"?!?!?

      MY ASS!!!! They don't know how to fix it so they called it a "feature".

      Unreal.

      http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009749.html
    • cliffzdude, on 10/12/2007, -7/+22I have been a zilla fan for years, I've used and recommended firefox since the beginning. That said, I love Firefox. But its performance has been degrading for a few months now with each new release. Of course you have to keep up for security's sake. As a test I uninstalled the most current Firefox, which -seems- to crash more than it used to. I then installed an older version I found sitting on our file server. Alas, it ran rock solid with not a single crash. Ahhh, the Firefox I grew to love. Fast and stable. Of course I went back to the most current release for the sake of security... My guess is (just a guess) the Firefox gang have had to push out some security changes without time to work on the stability issues, like the memory leak.

      I'm absolutely certain the Firefox gang will get this back up on track, such has been their history and I expect nothing less from this great group of developers.

      ..still using Firefox, still loving it.

    • skyshock21, on 10/12/2007, -11/+34Oh and BTW? Firefox does this in safemode too with NO extensions loaded. So it's NOT the extensions the Mozilla Dev team were so quickly to blame early on.
    • diggory, on 10/12/2007, -53/+67No, don't restart Windows...*re-install* WIndows. That solves most problems for me. I recommend doing it a couple of times a week.
    • gbresnahan2, on 10/12/2007, -120/+17bzzZzt wrong answer. It's a reason to use a real browser like IE. I've left my IE open for days/weeks and never had a problem like this.
    • lucask, on 10/12/2007, -14/+5@Furan

      Yeah it works.
    • kubudubudubuntu, on 10/12/2007, -25/+4yes , it's verry easy to copy/paste numbers to fake it....
    • shiftt, on 10/12/2007, -14/+107who the ***** still uses Frontpage?
    • Heembo, on 10/12/2007, -41/+9Hey, my dell 9100 dual-dual core with 3 gigs of physical ram never seems to have a problem with it! :P
    • WaterDragon, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10@ furan..
      CAN you please explain that a little further, for us non-coders?

      "The above post is incorrect. This will cause the working set to be trimmed, meaning any leaked memory will be paged to disk. The operating system will do this over time anyway, if the memory is truely leaked and the pages it occupies are not being touched. So the memory is not so much being reclaimed as paged out to disk, meaning it will occupy the page file for the lifetime of the process (and keep accumulating there as the leaked pages are paged out to disk)."

      ARE you saying that the above procedure will free up RAM, but will remain in the paging file for awhile, using up harddrive? (...My guess)

      If so, isn't that enormously better.

      It's getting so bad lately, i was thinking of going and buying some more RAM.

      So what is your reason why we shouldn't apply the above strategy?
      Thanks.

    • Clbck, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7IIRC, the memory leaks are from a firefox are actually a fix. The problem was that when you unminimised (Cant think of the word) firefox, it could take several minutes to show the page again. I'll look around for a link.
    • cliffzdude, on 10/12/2007, -12/+24Quit hassling the guy for having FrontPage opened, I note an ethereal Quick Launch so he may not be all that bad.

      Front Page is great for internal use by administrative assistants. My guess is the guy may support those who use Front Page. Just a guess, but why the hell give somebody a wrath of ***** when he has a program open and we do not KNOW WHY he uses it?

    • popfrogs, on 10/12/2007, -25/+19Marked as lame, no Digg. Firefox eats ram because it caches pages to make going backwards and forward faster. Sure, if you surf the hell out of Firefox for a week without rebooting (I wonder how, that must be a new record), Firefox's cache will get enormous.

      There have been posts on Digg, Slashdot, the Mozdev forums, everywhere on how to edit Firefox's caching scheme to limit ram and disk usage. This article is a prime example of ignorance, stupidity, or Microsoft astroturfing.
    • spitfire6006006, on 10/12/2007, -35/+7Diggory- "No, don't restart Windows...*re-install* WIndows. That solves most problems for me. I recommend doing it a couple of times a week."

      uh, most people don't have time to reinstall windows a couple times a week, and that's probably bad on your hard drive to constantly reinstall the os
    • seanmc303, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3Rub3X's config hack works great. Even if the the memory is being dumped off to swap, when Firefox is un-minimized, the physical memory footprint is much smaller.

      Iobaby also has a good point. It is hard, if not close to impossible, for Mozilla to ensure that all contributed extensions are going to be leak free. For me, Extensions are what makes Firefox shine, but unfortunately, those wonderful extensions could potentially be leaky.

      I love firefox and I truly think it is the best browser available (that includes Opera and Safari), but seriously, Firefox need to better address this issue.
    • TheReport, on 10/12/2007, -25/+5"who the ***** still uses Frontpage?"

      ***** noobs..
    • seanmc303, on 10/12/2007, -24/+5LOL. They guy is running Frontpage. NOOB!
    • seanmc303, on 10/12/2007, -15/+4@TheReport, Damn you for reading my mind.
    • q3ctf4, on 10/12/2007, -8/+7"Firefox eats ram because it caches pages to make going backwards and forward faster"

      Every browser does this. The ram displayed on task manager is ram used from memory cache. Browsing history is mainly stored on disk and doesn't show up on task manager.
    • OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -4/+111.5 GB in a week? I can cause that to happen within a couple of hours, maybe less.

      Firefox doesn't handle Windows Media and Flash too well. It also doesn't handle pics very well, especially hi-res pics. Every time you open graphic-intensive pages, Firefox leaks memory. The WMP plugin itself is extremely touchy. Click on something at the wrong time while it's running and it crashes and burns.

      I wish the devs would stop denying that the memory leak is happening and do something about it.
    • Jugalator, on 10/12/2007, -7/+9"Just a question: why would you leave it open for a week?"

      Because your computer doesn't crash? :-/
      We don't reboot our computers at work unless we have to.
      A better question here would seem to be why *shouldn't* we leave it open?
    • Balgor, on 10/12/2007, -8/+4@diggory.....
      What are you, a member of the GeekSquad?
    • danjal, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1whats that code you add to drop the memory usage when you "minimise" firefox, that thing is ace!
    • nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2I've developing a web app right now (last day of work this summer, woohoo! :) and it's routine for me to leave Camino running on my Mac. After a week-ish it'll be using up to a gig. Gecko is slow and has memory leaks, but I like the Gecko browsers so much I just don't care. Anytime I need to debug I wonder how I would survive without FF and the usual extensions.
    • brundlefly76, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Its really funny because when Firefox first came out, it was touted as the 'lean and mean' fast browser vs. IE feature bloat.

      Now its exactly the opposite, Firefox is the slow and bloated browser while IE and Opera are much faster and leaner.

      Open sourcers are just as fickle marketers as any company, if not more.

      That said, I wouldnt give up any of my Firefox features for anything!!
    • surfit, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2If you run something with Firefox that requires lots of memory like Photoshop and do some work whilst leaving Firefox running in the background, the browser will often "panic" (sorry for the non-technical term) and grab several MB's per second from memory. If you catch it quickly enough then you'll be able to close it, otherwise it's either Ctrl+Alt+Del and task manager to suspend it, or if it's really bad then pulling out the power is the only option as it brings Windows XP to a hault eventually. This happens to me maybe three times per day, I don't know why I put up with it.
    • skyshock21, on 10/12/2007, -5/+4@ Balgor

      I agree. Diggory's notion that you have to reinstall windows every week is utter non-sense. I had a machine running XP that ran from 2002-2006. No Anti-virus. No anti-spyware, open broadband connection (no firewall), and about an 80 GB hard drive dedicated to nothing but porn. It ran just as fast the day I installed XP as the day I wiped it in favor of Ubuntu. Never got a virus, never had malware, and it ran swimmingly fast on a paltry P4 2.4Ghz..

      All you have to do is be a Power User and only log in as Admin when you need to install something or make a system change; and make sure your Auto-updates feature is on. Anyone who thinks you need to re-install windows every week is a glittering gem of collosal stupidity and yes, most likely works for the Geek Squad.
    • nikkesen, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2I forget where, but you can turn a switch in the config mode for Firefox that reduces memory use to about 5 megs when you have the browser reduced.
    • diggeasytiger, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2No it isn't. He has deliberately installed Fasterfox and opened a website with hundreds and hundreds of links. Fasterfox extension has then fetched the entire content of these pages. he's clearly configured Fasterfox to increase the maximum limits it comes with.

      There is no "memory leak".... Firefox recently changed to caching in RAM a page history cache. This can be turned off.
    • SiLeNtHuNtER, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1try this www.benh.org/techblog/2006/07/reducing-memory-usage-in-firefox.html
  • jmcqk6, on 10/12/2007, -46/+14Sometimes people just do stupid things. I don't think this really demonstrates a problem with firefox, especially since this is way outside the range of normal usage.
    • raisinbran, on 10/12/2007, -2/+41Incredible. I too love Firefox, but I'm not blind to its faults.

      This is something that needs to be fixed.
    • jon3k, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@raisinbran

      type about:config
      and google "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers"
    • d8cam, on 10/12/2007, -6/+15"Warning: The Content in this Article May be Inaccurate [and has been reported only by fanboys]"
    • Clbck, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3It's not innacurate, but this is very old news. I've seen around 10 articles on this.

      And it was determined that this was a fix for a different issue. (The other issue was that it could take like 10 minutes to unminimize (still cant think of the word) firefox if you minimized it for a long period of time. Still looking around for a link. There was one in the comments of some other related story a while ago.
    • SeBsZ, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Maximize?
    • almightystoph, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2restore.
    • Clbck, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2lol. Yes. I just could not remember that.
  • nx01, on 10/12/2007, -1/+33Problem is that Firefox caches it's image files from sites that you'ved surfed to in your current session. I remember reading on /. that this was considered a feature by the Mozilla Dev team, and is not going to be fixed as it (supposedly) speeds up browsing to sites you've been to. Problem is, it slows the damn machine down making it almost useless if you leave it open for too long.
    • MartinSJacobson, on 10/12/2007, -4/+22he must be seriously exceeding his daily recommended pr0n intake!
    • gaurav4u99, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9i dont think so..
      my office thunderbird is on for ages and it is lightening speed..
      hmmm am on linux.
    • skyshock21, on 10/12/2007, -6/+40Then how does Opera and IE outperform Firefox in back/forward page rendering and NOT take up all your damn memory hm?? Let's call a spade a spade and stop being fanboys for a second shall we? This is a piss-poor design that they need to fix ASAP.
    • vermin, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14Then how does Opera manage to cache pages/images that reload instantaneously and they have no memory leaks.
    • prockcore, on 10/12/2007, -8/+8It's not piss poor design, it's just a bunch of people who don't understand memory caching.

      I'll make it simple for you:

      Your computer is not using that ram.
      If another App needs that ram, the OS will *reclaim* it.. meaning the ram usage by firefox will *shrink*.

      It's not a memory leak.. a memory leak is ram that never gets freed. This ram does get freed, but it gets marked in a way that firefox can continue to use it until another process allocates it.
    • CaughtThinking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Caches should not be infinite. Smart caching is implemented with a LRU (least recently used) algorithm so the system doesn't appear to leak memory and gets rid of the older stuff.
  • motang, on 10/12/2007, -21/+4I guess time to invest in more RAM...JK!!
  • sdrawkcaB, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Firefox is always using aorund 80 to 150 megs of my RAM, and sometimes hits up to 400! It would appear that it is more likely to use larger amounts the more RAM you have.
    • 0x00, on 10/12/2007, -17/+5All Windows programs do.
    • Asshate, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6And so it should, what's the beef? The guy at the top link has 2.5GB, what is he saving up for a rainy day?
    • skyshock21, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@Asshate

      The beef is that other browsers don't require that much memory and perform back/forward page rendering (The reason Mozilla gives for needing all that memory) more quickly. If you have that much RAM, you have it because you want to be able to run MANY MANY tasks efficiently, not because you want to dedicate all of it to your frickin' web browser.
  • Wilson, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11I hit 1GB after ~24 hours a week ago, but it hasn't happen since (an extension upgrade may have fixed it):
    http://steven.wilson.googlepages.com/firefoxmem.png
  • maninblac1, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13Obviously this wasn't a laptop, but i've seen firefox users who haven't closed their browsers have dozens of tabs open and haven't restarted their computers for weeks or months. They just close the lid and hibernate their machine.
  • fitzfan, on 10/12/2007, -46/+3Could someone get this guy WindowBlinds? man the classic Windows view is ugly.
    • bi0metric, on 10/12/2007, -25/+12Some people don't like to use the pretty pretty windows :P Dude maybe you should get apple and become an apple humper if u want pretty pretty! Join the cult!
    • razei, on 10/12/2007, -9/+13Looks better than XP's default theme.
    • garyh84, on 10/12/2007, -5/+23I use Windows Classic just because the colors in Windows XP hurt my eyes after a period of use.
    • jamesspelt, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2with a 2.5GB page file it's not surprising visual themes are turned off
    • shinynew, on 10/12/2007, -11/+2milkvista rocks
      styleXP from mininova and one restart later...
      http://tp-txdp4282.content-type.com/-1731556009/images/sshot-1.png
      got opera after firefox got 1.3 GBs of my 1.5 GBs of ram
    • Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Uh, XP has a silver theme? The Fisher-Price theme with the green hills background is optional, you know.
    • zybch, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10@shinynew
      My God thats ugly!!!
    • Rickler, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I wish windows forced its users to use a cheap looking brushed metal theme with shinny plastic buttons everywhere.
  • evilxhwnd, on 10/12/2007, -22/+5Frontpage sucks.
    • link470, on 10/12/2007, -17/+6lol I gotta say I noticed that too. I'm a dreamweaver/go live fan.
    • buss, on 10/12/2007, -13/+1no, no, its all about edit+
  • snuffulupagus, on 10/12/2007, -11/+2Just use a ram cleaner, like MaxMem (http://www.analogx.com/CONTENTS/download/system/maxmem.htm)
  • habitat2050, on 10/12/2007, -7/+19just close firefox, problem solved
    • bi0metric, on 10/12/2007, -16/+4Some people are idiots :P thats all I have 2 say!
    • rnmrnmrnm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2go to the opera.com
  • frofro, on 10/12/2007, -2/+39If it's Firefox that's leaking memory, then just restart Firefox rather than the entire OS.
  • tw0bit, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7How many extensions does he have? it must use alot of memory to begin with
  • Sajentine, on 10/12/2007, -5/+37What has this got to do with restarting Windows everyday?
    Restarting FF everyday, Yes.
    The headline is inaccurate.
    • pillfred, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Very true indeed.
    • Kittyflipping, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7Oh no, firefox is already using 750MB of memory and I've only had it open for a few hours... I better install Windows so I can restart it.
    • Rickler, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2The guy is just another Apple bigot. His kind is the reason people defend Windows.
    • theoallardyce, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Exactly, for once this isnt a Windows problem. This is a ***** retarded Firefox problem
  • clinko, on 10/12/2007, -13/+23"This is why you should restart Windows everyday, folks."

    How do you consider yourself computer literate? Have you used a PC with XP yet? I know, it's relatively new, I'm waiting until it gets out of beta too...

    oh wait, it's been around for 6 years, and I haven't had it crash yet...
    • blueigloo, on 10/12/2007, -11/+9Uh how computer literate are you? That looks like XP to me, he is just smart enough to disable the blue/green themed crap that takes up excessive amounts of resources.
    • mozzep, on 10/12/2007, -6/+8this is xp, considering itunes doesn't run on 98... no idea why you're digging the original poster.
    • clinko, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Some people don't understand sarcasm either apparently...
    • Jugalator, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1In case you're using sarcasm, it has to be double sarcasm for you to be right. The first layer was easily enough spotted. :-p
  • Fredx, on 10/12/2007, -11/+457 total processes, yes no doubt windows is running slow
    • foolfromhell, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3I have 49 processes when I do a reboot.... No programs are open or are running on the background except Steam......
    • sirmasterboy, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3wow i only have 23 processes which take up 180mb of my 2GB of ram. This includes norton, and my logitech keboard/mouse software.
    • emorphien, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I'd rather have 57 processes than norton (unless its the corporate version).

      I keep trying to trim out processes, but ultimately each one is something I use or want to have on. I think when I boot I'm in the high 40s, but once I get all the applications running which I usually leave on, I get closer to 60.

      And I don't reboot often. Usually I leave my comp on for months at a time.
    • jon3k, on 10/12/2007, -8/+8Yes, and I have 86 processes running on my Ubuntu (Dapper) install after turning off most of the *****, and having just logged in.

      ZoMG Ubuntu must suck almost twice as much as windows!

      You people are ***** idiots. Lemmings, the lot of you.
    • sandrock, on 10/12/2007, -1/+029 processes currently, including my web browser, 2 IM clients, bittorrent client, daemon tools and anti-virus
  • blueigloo, on 10/12/2007, -6/+17ewww FrontPage and McAfee! ;-)
  • daniel, on 10/12/2007, -6/+6Prolly just some stupid extension causing the huge RAM usage. Mine's never gone above 130megs, besides when whatching streaming movies. But what has this got to do with restarting windows?
  • JulianPrice, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4You might as well conclude that you should unplug your computer and dance around it while chanting--it makes about as much sense and would be as effective at reclaiming memory from Firefox.
  • jsleno, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Is this an issue with other OSes as well? I use FireFox on Windows and Ubuntu, but I always close it down at the end of the day. I'm curious if anyone has seen this behavior away from Windows though
    • tyno, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0On my laptop running Debian, 381mb virtual, 232mb resident after firefox running for 4 days. This is about the most I see on this box as I've set the cache settings to low numbers.
      On my home machine running Ubuntu I see firefox taking up 2-3gb of ram after a few days. That's about as high as it goes. My machines usually stay up for 2 or 3 months between reboots.
    • skyshock21, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Absolutely. On my home Ubuntu machine I've seen FF eating up 780 Megs. I have 1 GB. Opera never goes much above 80 Megs.

      I've since stopped using FF completely. It's been worthless ever since after about 1.0.3.
  • bennyboy371, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Even with no extensions, my Firefox runs with about 300MB of memory in use on average. I use a laptop, and a memory cleaner doesn't help the problem. Even after going through all the little helps and fixes I've found online, it still uses hundreds of megabytes of memory. Yes, it uses plenty of memory on my system by default. Some systems use more RAM in Firefox than others.
  • Justin6512, on 10/12/2007, -27/+3sounds like a ram leak problem in firefox, I'm sure they'll patch it. Buy a mac and you'll never have to restart your computer for like a week!
    • kettlechips, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Look what you've done, you made me use the bury button!
    • popfrogs, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8I'll use a Mac when I can physically build one to my liking, therefore avoiding the nasty OEM taxes and performance problems from out-of-the-box vendors like Dell and Gateway. Also their limited hardware selections that result from them cutting deals with Intel and/or AMD and junky motherboard manufacturers are a huge drawback 90% of the time.

      Apple got it right when they licensed the OS and hardware to third parties, but since their competitors were alot smarter with business, it nearly killed them. I seriously doubt we will ever see the day you can just 'build' a MacOS PC for any number of reasons. Therefore, I can honestly state that I'll probably never own a Mac.
    • spitfire6006006, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4never have to restart you computer for a week?
      you can do that with windows if you're not a moron or using a dell
      apples might melt by then
    • rkuchiki, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"Buy a mac and you'll never have to restart your computer for like a week!"

      Of course, it'll just reboot itself, like Kevin's.
  • emorphien, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I've had this problem before too... but it was an older version. I've found that in recent months it has been much better behaved.

    Of course for whatever reason, at the time, I could not take a screen shot. So I took a photo instead:
    http://www.rit.edu/~cgs2794/files/pub/bigfirefox.jpg

    Most of the time I find excessive RAM consumption seems to be possibly related to a bad extension.
    • ThinkFr33ly, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2Good to see a fellow tiger on Digg. :)
  • ktchpmn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3After looking at this picture I realized that I had Firefox open for a few days...low and behold it was taking up 275MB of RAM. I only have 512MB, ouch.
  • hulkdigg, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1Isn't this more an issue with caching ... and simply restarting Firefox takes care of the problem?
  • futureundead, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7An earlier poster asked why one would want to keep a browser open for long periods of time. Answer: because there are things you want to read, or things you can't get to right now, that you want to eventually. I know, everyone will reply, "bookmarks!", but have you taken the time to look through your bookmarks lately? How much crap is in there that you haven't checked in months?

    Personally, I leave a window open because I'm more often than not surfing for some bit of information or another at some point in the day, and it is not uncommon for me to note 400-700 megs of memory use; which is why I shut it down when playing any games (the Session Manager extension is quite nice, especially for those occasional crashes).
  • ravenofwinter, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2Let's see, you leave a program not designed with the idea that it'll be open for a long period to run for a week?

    Of course you'll get memory leaks. Not that we can confirm this is a leak, since there could be some ungodly huge page open in one of the tabs under the task manager. Nor do we know the uptime of the system for sure.

    If that last is true though, you can look at the other programs though, and see they're fine. So at least the worry of whether or not you can run Windows for a week or not is no longer relevent.

  • thegcinfo, on 10/12/2007, -6/+5restart Windows because Firefox is a memory whore? So because my windshield wipers malfunction after being on after a certain amount of time I should turn my car off then on instead of restarting the windshield wipers? Try Seamonkey it makes a lot more sense and doesn't have the problems firefox has.
  • yuutomo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4looks like they're running at minimum of 8 extensions and one of those or a combination there of is the culprit, not Firefox.
    • Soulhuntre, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Of course if this was happening in IE the FF fanbois would be whining that a extension shouldn't be able to cause these kind of problems and blaming MS anyway.

      And to prove how clever they were, they would spell MS with a $ and work in a chair throwing reference.
  • yuutomo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6and I have had Firefox open and running for a month and it's using 48MB total.
  • Majdaa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I'd just like to point out that Safari is notorious for memory leaks too, not that i'm a mac basher or anything, but i've got safari up to 400mb
  • dave98, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I use 2.0 beta 1 with 29 extensions. Goes slightly above 200MB at most with peak memory usage during a lot of image browsing etc. It goes back down to about 80-90MB after a few minutes though. No big memory leak problems here.

    you guys could give 2.0 beta 1 a try
  • dave98, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2also, this in no way fixes the problem but it can be a bit of a band-aid solution.

    the restart tabbed extension. Allows you to restart Firefox with all previous tabs intact by a click of a single button.
    https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2347/

    or of course there are always other browsers like Opera to try
  • 83457, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4config.trim_on_minimize = true
  • gamemaster357, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1use this memory tweak

    http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2006/03/26/this-may-help-your-firefox-memory-leak/
  • war2d2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Yeah, I love FF and all, but that's not windows' fault. I haven't restarted my dev box at work since the last round of patches, and before that the previous restart was from the patch a couple months before that. I think I've had to restart about 3 times this year, that I can recall. I've never noticed any slowdown.
  • radison2, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5using firefox to make windows look bad. Have we stooped this low?
  • WaterDragon, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2Damn I was wondering why my RAM seemed to be not working correctly ( ~768 MB). I guess it's 'cause I just use 'sleep mode', instead of actually shutting down Winblows.
    I'll try shutting down , and see if it helps.

    Once again, i am grateful for the awesome benefits of being a part of the DIGG NATION!
    Give yourselves a round of applause! LMFAO
  • foolfromhell, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4This could be staged by opening a HUGE .txt file with Firefox.....
    • akashra, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Two years ago I was working with 15MB XML files (Microsoft Project files in XML format)... Mozilla would easily get to 2GB of used RAM by opening these. And you would virtually never get control back of the system.
      IE would manage, but only barely.
  • Jammerdelray, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1That figures if you never restart and thats probably not the only problem your having.
  • jimmsta, on 10/12/2007, -10/+3Keep in mind - Taskmanager does NOT report realistic memory use. You have to use something like Sysinternals' Process Explorer to get a real memory reading. Sure, Firefox may have used 1.5GB of RAM... TOTAL, over the course of the week... But at the time that the screenshot was taken, it was only taking up as much ram as it needed to sustain a bunch of tabs.

    Windows has strange memory reporting techniques. There has not been a memory leak in Firefox for ages.
    • TheG2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Wow, the propaganda has hit you really hard hasn't it.
  • thechadnz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11LOL @ having to restart windows...

    OMG APACHE IS USING LOTS OF RAM RESTART FEDORA!!!
  • sdubois92, on 10/12/2007, -10/+1i like firefox, but opera is the superior windows browser. but windows sucks. safari rocks
    • TheG2, on 10/12/2007, -5/+5Opera wins in my book, does all the things by default that Firefox needs "Extensions" for. And how many ideas have we seen Firefox rip right from Opera's feature list?
    • Hindu_Wardrobe, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3Firefox is open source.
      Ha.
    • vahnx, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I tried Opera... Faster than Ie7... Slower than Firefox Preloader + Tweaking, Firefox > Opera in my book.
    • spitfire6006006, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2thats kind of the point of extensions, to make it easier to customize firefox, so it lets you build it from the bottom up, as opposed to taking away all the stuff you don't want, plus its a smaller download size for the installer
    • TheG2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@spitfire6006006

      It's a one time download...who cares about the installer size.

      And my point is that Opera doesn't have the memory leak issue and does everything Firefox does and in most cases better because its built in and not tacked on as an "extension"
  • ne0shell, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5you should get the memory leak checking extension because your issue is most likely a poorly written extension in use. I leave my XP Pro desktop on constantly, (up-time is 6 months +) with Firefox and my verified extensions and I have no memory issues at all.
    • MrSelfDestruct, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3So you haven't installed windows security updates for six months?
    • ne0shell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1No actually I haven't - I'm behind a Linux firewall and i don't use IE - I'll let everyone else test out the MS patches for a while.
  • gprime, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5Damn! I was using less when I had 90 tabs open in 1 window with Opera.
    • spitfire6006006, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1did these 90 tabs have anything in them, or were they empty tabs, because i can see no good reason for having 90 tabs open
  • konno, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4A good reason to rebuild on XP once a year too.
  • jon3k, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10Marked innacurate. This is a known firefox problem, not a windows problem.
    • TheG2, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Don't dig him down just because he's right kids. Remember, just because your a fanboy doesn't give you the right to ignore reality.
    • jon3k, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Thats halarious considering I'm posting this from Firefox in Dapper.

      Tinfoil hat on a little tight tonight kiddo?
  • CamperBob, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6So, I finally switched to Firefox after the latest Windows Update cycle hosed IE6 beyond all recognition. I'd downloaded a copy several months ago, but I'd never had any real incentive to install it.

    - Very nice browser -- I can see why people like it. I remember thinking, "Gee, they should let me close a tab by middle-clicking it, instead of making me use the right-click context menu." Then I tried it... and surprise, midde-clicking lets you close a tab.

    That kind of "Whoa" moment is the best way a designer can persuade me that he/she knows his/her *****. The last time it happened to me was when I wandered over to an iMac in a colleague's office, picked up its remote, and thought about how cool it'd be if there were a magnet in the case that could hold it to the side of the screen. Firefox's tabbed-browsing implementation is, well... like that.

    - Terrible, buggy download manager. I found I had to clear the cache manually (Tools->Options->Privacy->Clear Cache Now) to force it to re-download a recently-updated file. What the page cache has to do with the file-download cache, I don't know, but the download dialog's "Cleanup" button appears to have no effect beyond the purely cosmetic.

    - No two-way FTP support. IE6's built-in FTP client is actually really nice, if you haven't used it. Firefox's FTP support is download-only. IE6's drag-and-drop support is definitely missed.

    I haven't run into the infamous "memory leak" issue, but I've certainly been hearing about it long enough. What's their problem, exactly? Has anyone tried running SmartHeap on a Firefox/Mozilla build?
    • popfrogs, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3You need the ftp extension named FireFTP if you want two-way ftp within Firefox. It's very quick, super easy to setup, tiny to install, and just works brilliantly.

      It always freaks me out when I visit sites in IE6 because there is a ton of junk on every single site you visit. I've been using Adblock Plus so long I nearly forgot how cluttered and ***** up most sites look by default.

      Here's a short, sweet, necessary extension list to make Firefox mostly perfect:

      1. Adblock Plus
      2. Filterset G updater for Adblock Plus (feeds it fresh lists of junk to block)
      3. IE View, for those 5% of sites that don't render properly, they're a right-click away
      4. FireFTP
      5. PDF Download, a true blessing, that lets you open PDFs standalone in Acrobat Reader or just download the damn things. No more browser and computer-hogging nonsense just because you click on a PDF link sometime.
      6. Flash..kind of a given, but not installed by default.
    • CamperBob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@popfrogs
      Thanks for the suggestions, particularly FireFTP. Will check them out!
    • ramsinks.com, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Pop - also check out "reload every".
      Killer for those stock broker cleints.

      ;)
    • jon3k, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3@popfrogs

      Wow, you installed a plugin to launch reader?

      Tools -> Options -> Downloads -> View & Edit Actions -> type "PDF" -> Change Action -> Open With Default Action (as opposed to use Plugin)

      You can now uninstall your extension and you're welcome :)
    • ne0shell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1you can fix the download issue with configuration and there are tons of great FREE download and FTP extensions - that's what's so great about Firefox, it very customizable.
    • RavenLemo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1eh, nice thx :Do you want to be my new best friend?
  • MagicBobert, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2Nice screen grab!

    But you lose manly points for using Frontpage... :)
  • cfsporn, on 10/12/2007, -10/+4What trick did you use to get windows to run for a week and not have the computer blow up!
    • spitfire6006006, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4it's not that hard
      xp can run for a long time without needing a reboot, no matter what all the mac fanboys have to say
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