Woah. Firefox's Mental Memory

SiriusB

SiriusB

SiriusB

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My Ubuntu Gutsy was being really slow today and I thought I would check my Process Manager. Looked at my memory usage and it was at 99% and 99% of my swap had also been used :eek:

I thought maybe I just had too many apps running and started closing some stuff down, nothing made much of an impact. I then closed Firefox and my memory usage dropped from 1.8GB to 800MB. That's a 1GB drop!

I knew Firefox had memory issues but I have never seen it that bad :/
 
Firefox got so bad under windows for me (even without any plugins) I went back to Opera. It's not quite as bad under linux but it still soaks up memory like a sponge.
 
opera is all I have used for years now linux/windows its not perfect by any means but I prefer it to the alternatives by a long long way.
 
FF has always had a problem with memory leaks. They have even said it themselves, IIRC. Apparently they've treid to improve it with FF3.0. 1GB is insane, I've only managed to get it to 400M at the most.
 
Yeah I switched to Opera about 6 months ago from FF and haven't looked back. It does take a month or 2 to get used to, especially after having used FF since phoenix, and all the netscapes before that.

But it's worth it. I was using FF (the latest 2.xx) the other day and It is so slow and laggy compared to opera especialy with multiple tab downloads. +

I have 3 Opera windows open with a total of 63 tabs open and it's only using 176 Meg in taskmanger, and it's still lightning fast.
 
I think they were around the end of October, but the alpha was a few months before that. I haven't tried the 64bit yet as I'm still only i386 :/ But apparently it runs very well with the same bugs er I mean features as the 32 bit version.
 
Hi SiriusB

Have you tried the Fasterfox add-on?

It allows you to set the memory and disk cache which proberly accounts for most of the resource used by FF.
 
Yeah, it's not /that/ many is it? It was one window with 40 or so and then about 15 intthe other and OCUK the last one.

Plus my machine was on I think 26 or 27 days uptime and I would say Opera had been open probably for about all of them days. Seriously give it a decent try - a month at least. You may be surprised :)
 
I had two windows open and a total of about 10 tabs. I have one window for random browsing, so tabs like Google, OcUK etc. The other I use for when developing, testing pages, tutorial/reference sites etc.

Not sure how long they were open for [rarely reboot] but 1GB is insane whichever way you look at it. Will look into fasterfox. Have used it before but never noticed any great improvements.
 
I'd put money on that the leaks were the result of a plugin - especially Flash.

No one's ever really demonstrated that Fx actually has a "memory problem" (besides some stupid things like storing images fully decoded, which is now fixed) - most of the leaks that exist in Firefox itself have been fixed long ago, except in the minds of Digg users ...

This is a good read, incidentally.
 
tolien said:
I'd put money on that the leaks were the result of a plugin - especially Flash.
Click to expand...

It's possible since although I often ran FF minus any add ons I never bothered to try it minus plugins such as flash etc. However, I don't suffer the same problem with Opera using the same plugins, which makes me wonder? (I wont bother to boot windoze and check IE7 mem usage as iirc it's spread over half a dozen different processes and is therefore meaningless)
 
Flash is the only major plugin I have, and it is a bit of a hack too, since there is no 64-bit version of Flash [or rather no 64-bit version that works].
 
If it's the Ubuntu-supplied version, you should beware that Ubuntu fiddle with the source themselves as well.

Sp!ke said:
However, I don't suffer the same problem with Opera using the same plugins, which makes me wonder?
Click to expand...

Is it the same plugin version (about:config in both)?
You'd be shocked at how bad Flash can be, and the installer doesn't keep every occurrence up to date...
 
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