Firefox memory leaks

Stky10

More a firefox problem than a windows problem but anyway....

I've recently being experiencing huge memory leaks with Firefox, it using up to 700Mb of RAM. Its currently using over 500Mb as I write this, and I've only 11 tabs open. Its bound to be due to memory leaks in extensions I've installed, but how do I know which ones?

aidan_walsh

Its bound to be due to memory leaks in extensions I've installed

Not necessarily the fault of the extension developer. Firefox is famously hopeless with memory management.

Stky10

Thats true, but I'm sure if I had no extensions installed it would run a lot faster and wouldn't take up the memory that it does.

Hopefully, they'll have made improvements in V2.0 out soon.

Stky10

I'll try this and see how it goes...

http://dbaron.org/mozilla/leak-monitor/

Ruu_Old

I done this and it cut the memory usage in half or more. Worked great for me.

Capt'n Midnight

from the above link

1. Open a new tab. Type "about:config" without quotes into the address bar and hit enter/click Go.

2. Right-click anywhere, select New, then Integer. In the dialog prompt that appears, type:

browser.cache.memory.capacity

3. Click OK. Another dialog prompt will appear. This is where you decide how much memory to allocate to Firefox. This depends on how much RAM your computer has, but generally you don't want to allocate too little (under 8MB), but if you allocate too much, you might as well not do this. A good recommended setting is 16MB. If you want 16MB, enter this value into the dialog prompt:

16384

(Why 16384 instead of 16000? Because computers use base-12 counting. Thus 16 megabytes = 16384 bytes. Likewise, if you want to double that and allocate 32MB, you'd enter 32768.)

4. Click OK to close the dialog box, then close all instances of Firefox and restart. If your Firefox still uses the same amount of memory, give it a few minutes and it should slowly clear up. If that fails, try a system reboot.

cyrus the virus

Extensions suck up memory. Read

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions
and
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/optimization/popular-firefox-extensions-leak-memory-165193.php

bigtimecharlie

Sorry for the dumb question, but how do you guy's know how much memory is being used, i.e. how much RAM is being used at any one time?

Karoma

bigtimecharlie wrote:

Sorry for the dumb question, but how do you guy's know how much memory is being used, i.e. how much RAM is being used at any one time?

Depends on your OS. However:
In Windows: ctrl+alt+del (Press and hold the keys in sequence) -> click on Processes or Performance
Also, you can get 3rd party app's to give you a better breakdown.

Ruu_Old

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del and select the Performance tab, all the information you need is there.

juliuspret

Fask Manager is very bad (for me anyway) for measuring the memory eating abilities of Firefox or Opera.

I use Ctrl+T and Ctrl+N a lof an dsometime forget how many windows I might have open until everything starts to run veeeery sloooow!

When I look at Task Manager it might say Firefox is using 150MB but when I End Process Firefox.exe and wait a couple of seconds....bam....500MB freed!