Firefox using up to 400MB+ wtf?

demonspawn

So Firefox has been using up to 400MB of my system memory, sometimes up to around 450MB. Anyone know what's causing this? There's also something called Firefox plug-in tray that's using up to 30-40MB, any idea what this is?

I've scanned my laptop several time with Avast! using the most thorough scan and nothing's coming up. I'm thinking of just reinstalling but don't want to lose all my bookmarks and settings etc. It's lagging me out all to hell and I'm becoming pretty frustrated as just changing tabs takes a few seconds. Any advice?

u140acro3xs7dm

you could have too many plug-ins or ad-ons installed. A quick google came up with this page, I have not tried it but it seems to have good feedback.

grizzly

Is RAM tied up that you need for other tasks? If it's not doing anything else it can be a good thing that it's cacheing pages for quick retrieval.

youcancallmeal

Firefox has been steadily decreasing in quality over the last couple of years, its a massive resource hog. Even IE is arguably a better choice these days. Rumour has it Firefox 4 will fix things. Best thing would be to change to Google Chrome as it is much more efficient.

To fix your problem though try deleting your profile and create a new one. It usually speeds things up quite a lot depending on how long you have Firefox installed. Just remember to save your bookmarks first!
Creating a new profile

muckwarrior

youcancallme>al wrote: »

Firefox has been steadily decreasing in quality over the last couple of years, its a massive resource hog.

Bollox! FF3 and above was a huge improvement over FF2 which just continued chewing up more and more ram the longer it was open. I think 3.9GB was my record.

noxqs

You have to understand how Firefox handles memory before getting all worked up about the memory it appears to be using. A good post is by a Firefox Dev explaining the situation here:

http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/

Pre-allocating memory is more effient than performing "after-the-fact" allocation and will speed things up generally. The OS is aware that some memory is pre-allocated and will take it away if needed by another process. But this will make Firefox look like it's using more memory than it actually is. I think the ratio is aproximately 4:1 atleast when I check under OSX.

Another interesting fact is that a PNG/JPG file when stored in memory is deflated. If you have ever compressed bitmap file to PNG/JPG you would know that something simple like a banner sized picture might take up several MB of storage, and this is exactly the case on a modern webpage. Add to that, the DOM and JS and addons like flash etc.. And it is not hard to explain why a browser takes up so much RAM.

youcancallmeal

Just try Google Chrome and see the difference! Reminds me of what Firefox was like when it first came out, loading pages insanely fast and just an overall smoother experience. I think the problem with Firefox is that the codebase has expanded so much now thats its become quite inefficient.

chin_grin

youcancallme>al wrote: »

Just try Google Chrome and see the difference! Reminds me of what Firefox was like when it first came out, loading pages insanely fast and just an overall smoother experience. I think the problem with Firefox is that the codebase has expanded so much now thats its become quite inefficient.

Or this.

http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_download.php

demonspawn

noxqs wrote: »

You have to understand how Firefox handles memory before getting all worked up about the memory it appears to be using. A good post is by a Firefox Dev explaining the situation here:

http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/

Pre-allocating memory is more effient than performing "after-the-fact" allocation and will speed things up generally. The OS is aware that some memory is pre-allocated and will take it away if needed by another process. But this will make Firefox look like it's using more memory than it actually is. I think the ratio is aproximately 4:1 atleast when I check under OSX.

Another interesting fact is that a PNG/JPG file when stored in memory is deflated. If you have ever compressed bitmap file to PNG/JPG you would know that something simple like a banner sized picture might take up several MB of storage, and this is exactly the case on a modern webpage. Add to that, the DOM and JS and addons like flash etc.. And it is not hard to explain why a browser takes up so much RAM.

But this has only been happening for the past 3 weeks or so. I've had this laptop for 4 years now and never had this problem. Well, I think I'll just try another browser and see how that goes. I used IE for a bit today and I don't think it passed 100MB, but I hate IE so I may try one of the others mentioned. Thanks for your time.