How much memory should firefox use?

breadmonkey · 09-11-2009 11:34pm #1

Firefox has lately been using up anything between 200,000k and 600,000k which seems really weird. Is this normal? I also can't open a second incidence of the browser. Anyone know why this would be the case and is it linked to the memory usage?

Thanks.

Overheal · 09-11-2009 11:47pm

I can drop 150meg without breaking a sweat.

Depends on your addies. If you have a large number of plugins (or a few very heavy ones) it could be causing this.

Captain Furball · 10-11-2009 1:12am

What do you mean overheal?
You can drop 150 meg?

Soundman · 11-11-2009 5:49am

What Overheal means is that while using Firefox, if he was to look in Task Manager, he would notice that the memory usage for the application in question (Firefox) could easily be hitting 150,000K.

Currently I have 6 tabs open:

www.peopleofwalmart.com
A picture of a Malamute puppy in a fridge
www.emailsfromcrazypeople.com
Scrabble on Facebook
Site for streaming the Simpsons episodes
www.boards.ie

My Add-Ons are:

Adblock Plus
StumbleUpon
British Dictionary
Xmarks

My current memory usage according to Task Manager is:

317,808K

So in conclusion depending on what you are doing and what you have installed you can easily drop a ton or six of memory usage.

breadmonkey · 11-11-2009 5:59pm

Thanks lads. I'll take a look at the plugins. I probably have a load that I'm not using hogging the memory.

Captain Furball · 12-11-2009 3:04pm

But what does it matter?
Each application can have 4 gig of memory.
Not sure why you lads seem so intrigued.

sceptre · 12-11-2009 6:37pm

Captain Furball wrote: »

But what does it matter?
Each application can have 4 gig of memory.
Not sure why you lads seem so intrigued.

Er, firstly, it's lower than 4GB of memory unless the OP is using a 64-bit operating system. Secondly, each app can't have that amount of memory - that's the total amount available to all apps in total. Thirdly, having an efficient computer is better than having an inefficient one, especially with the amount of memory limited to the above. Fourthly, it seems high to him, hence he's asking the question, which seems pretty rational to me, especially given the above - RAM is finite and costs more than nothing. And finally, you're assuming that the OP actually has 4GB of RAM in his machine, which he didn't say he had. Lots of people (most people) don't have 4GB of RAM in their machines in any case.

My FF usage can sometimes hit 1.3 to 1.4GB. The latest Flash plugin for mozilla has a memory leak and I doubt it's the only one that has. At the moment I have 30 or 40 tabs open and it's "only" using 314MB but that's rather low as a general indication. Either way, I would be more likely to suspect the plugins based on personal experience.

John2009 · 12-11-2009 6:52pm

You could also try these out with FireFox

http://rapid.org/board/showthread.php?t=104382

+

http://rapid.org/board/showthread.php?t=112464

Hopefully it helps abit

EKRIUQ · 12-11-2009 7:31pm

I find once Firefox hits about 200,000 it needs a complete restart as it becomes very unresponsive. I'm running on 2GB of ram on my desktop

Captain Furball · 13-11-2009 12:31am

sceptre wrote: »

Er, firstly, it's lower than 4GB of memory unless the OP is using a 64-bit operating system. Secondly, each app can't have that amount of memory - that's the total amount available to all apps in total. Thirdly, having an efficient computer is better than having an inefficient one, especially with the amount of memory limited to the above. Fourthly, it seems high to him, hence he's asking the question, which seems pretty rational to me, especially given the above - RAM is finite and costs more than nothing. And finally, you're assuming that the OP actually has 4GB of RAM in his machine, which he didn't say he had. Lots of people (most people) don't have 4GB of RAM in their machines in any case.

My FF usage can sometimes hit 1.3 to 1.4GB. The latest Flash plugin for mozilla has a memory leak and I doubt it's the only one that has. At the moment I have 30 or 40 tabs open and it's "only" using 314MB but that's rather low as a general indication. Either way, I would be more likely to suspect the plugins based on personal experience.

Your incorrect.
Every process has a virtual address space size of (4GB)
The process obviously has dlls and other shared resources which share the other 2 gig depending on your hardware i.e. video cards etc.
Virtual memory and paging are not so limited......

About the rest of your rant, ya I agree with you. Efficiency is key.

How much memory should firefox use?

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