Firefox 4 - Memory Useage

Soldato
Joined
8 Oct 2005
Posts
4,184
Location
Midlands, UK
Hi,

I'm on Win 7 x64 and am using FF4.

Is the following normal?

I have roughly 20 tabs open. When FF4 loads the memory useage immediately levels out around 470 MB.

I've just been doing a bit of light browsing and have a quick look at the memory useage after one hour - it was a huge 2.2 GB.

Is this normal, as I don't rember FF3 using that much.

Thanks
 
Sounds excessive.....

To be honest with you, Im a big Firefox fan, but this release still needs some polish.

Im looking forward to see what the fast track development of Firefox will bring.

Mozilla are aiming for version 7 by the end of the year.
 
My FF 4 was opened this morning (I don't turn my PC off, ever) and has been used for almost everything from iPlayer to multiple image tabs (wallbase) as well as browsing the random vids/pics threads. I have 25 extensions installed.

Sitting at 580MB.

It's dependant on what you browse mainly. If I open a big thread on Joe Rogan forums it will rocket to 1GB but it won't slouch one bit. Those threads are massive as well.

If it's not sluggish on your machine then just leave it be, It will manage itself just fine. Memory being utilised is a good thing.

If that isn't the case then you might have an extension or plugin leaking memory. Start with a fresh profile and browse the same sites and monitor memory from there.

I've not seen a memory problem on any of the 4 major browsers on any machine at home or at work when testing for compliance with my network.
 
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Chrome will use 2.2gigs if you have 20 data heavy tabs open, its quite normal. Then again chrome has no upper limit on cache size wile ff4 is capped at 1 gig so win some loose some.

Unless you actually nee that ram for something else leave it alone. Unless is slowly keeps up and you locate a memory leak.

Edit: actually if you're on BB then you really should enable the pipelining options in the link above.
 
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Well, may have found the offending plugin. I was currently sitting at just under 2GB with all my original tabs open.

I randomly noticed in the bottom right hand corner that firebug was running for all pages. Turnied this off and after about 5 mins the memory useage shot own to around 500MB.

If you right click on the small firebug icon you get the latter option.
 
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