Upgraded to Firefox 2.x, sill leaking memory like crazyproductivity, developers, customer adventures, add-ins and toolbars — by TDavid @ 1:01 pm PST
 (1 votes, average: 5 out of 5) Loading ... |
I held out successfully until yesterday upgrading to Firefox 2.x. The reason being that I’ve been satisfied with the existing Firefox setup and extensions — ok, add-ons is what they’re being called now — I’m using and weren’t sure how many were compatible with 2.x. Also, I’ve learned over time and experience that being the first to upgrade can also have unintended consequences. So I cast my fears aside — whether legitimate or not — and installed version 2.0.
I’m probably echoing a long series of boos but this is a very unimpressive full version upgrade. I don’t like what they did with the tabbed browsing at all. Don’t want the close button on each tab and miss the shrinking tabs instead of the annoying arrows on both sides (the Tab Mix Plus add-in does ‘fix’ some of this by allowing reverting to a “traditional” style). One of my most used add-ins (screen capture) doesn’t work. With less add-ins, Firefox 2.x is leaking even more memory than 1.5.8. What a way to encourage people to switch to other browsers or downgrade. Reminds me a bit of what happened with Winamp after 2.x.
I realize there are tools to help me debug what add-ons are leaking and tutorials/tips/tricks for how to reduce Firefox memory leaks but all of this feels like I’m being the perpetual beta tester for every add-on developer and the Firefox team. Come on, developers, debug your stuff better before releasing!
This is a major drawback for Firefox over Opera which doesn’t have anywhere near these amount of memory leak issues (nor the amount of plugins, so that could partly explain it). It’s ridiculous for anyone to have 2GB of RAM and need to restart Firefox almost daily.
Before anybody gets on my case about being an add-on whore and that being my main problem (and that might indeed be a significant part of the problem), I have 15 add-ons currently installed:
Adsense Notifier
Colorzilla
Customize google
Download status bar
Leak Monitor
McAfee Site Advisor
Measure It
Screen Grab (to be uninstalled)
Search Status
Show IP
Signature
Skype Plugin for Firefox
stickis (testing)
StumbleUpon
Tab Mix Plus
If this is extreme compared to what most others are using (in terms of number of add-ons), I’m all ears for how others are better managing so they can stay productive? I could probably axe half these add-ons to get down to what I’m really using on a regular basis, but then there goes the functionality that I’ve enjoyed with Firefox. I’m sure there is some way to have my cake and eat it too, short of me debugging each of the add-ons and digging into the Firefox source code.
Anybody else having major Firefox memory leakage problems? For any Firefox add-ons developers that might be reading what steps are you taking before releasing your plugin to make sure it doesn’t have leakage problems?
Update 6:54pm PST: I see Sterling (link below) thinks all these add-ons are the main culprit too. Alright, I just uninstalled all 15 add-ons listed above and restarted Firefox. It loaded with 39,916k with a single tab open. I opened the minimum number of tabs that I typically work with which is five: two admin-related tabs, a Gmail tab, a reBlog (RSS reader) tab, and a browse tab and let things just sit.
Meanwhile, IE7 has been running in the background for a couple hours with a single tab and is using 28,248k memory. Will check back on this situation later or first thing tomorrow and update. I’m going to establish a baseline memory pattern and then start adding back the add-ons one at a time to establish which one(s) are the memory thieves.
Update 8:44pm PST: Firefox now using 84,124k. It has doubled in memory usage with no add-ons and a default 2.0 installation and an increase in one tab. IE7 with still one tab? 28,328.
11/30/2006 6:08am PST: Overnight with no further user activity on the machine, Firefox now, still with zero add-ons, using memory: 85,352k. As long as I don’t use it, it balances out. While typing this and working for 10 minutes, the load shot up to 94,212k. Also see comments below, I’m not the only one experiencing memory problems with Firefox 2.0.
11/30/2006 7:04am PST: Firefox now up to 108,940. Meanwhile, IE7 still at 28,472. Just for kicks, I decided to load up tabs in IE7 with the same pages and number of tabs that are sitting in Firefox. In fact, I added two additional tabs in IE7 and are using those to browse and work instead of Firefox.
11/30/2006: 8:44am PST: Exactly 12 hours since this browser experiment began. Firefox now at 110,372k has been minimized with the same tabs while I’ve been using IE7 which has shot up to 67,860k. I’m going to reboot the computer now and start fresh and see what happens over the next 12 hours.
Related Posts- Tabbed browsing in IE via MSN Toolbar
- IE 7 to support png, tabbed browsing, RSS aggregator and more?
- Need some PC133 SDRAM, good place to buy?
- IE7 will be more secure … in Longhorn
- Flexbeta: 13 Reasons To Use Firefox Over IE
- Microsoft Watch bets on Internet Explorer upgrade before Longhorn
[…] TDavid says that Firefox 2 still has memory leaks. Since upgrading to version 2, I haven’t had to close it to free up memory at all, and in version 1.5 that was a regular activity. Could be all those extensions, er I mean add-ons, TD. Although after an initial startup size of about 23MB, it does use up to between 180-200MB on my system after opening and closing a few tabs. But then it seems to level off. […]
Pingback by Chipping the web - tribes, disciples, eggs, months, and angry men -- Chip’s Quips — November 29, 2006 @ 9:10 pm PST
Had been using firefox for some time, still broke out IE7 from time to time but firefox was much faster and I like the add-ons. Some memory issues with 1.5 but mostly start up at beginning of day and close at end, moved up to 2.0 and found myself having to kill firefox reguarly since it would almost hang the system, lots of memory, lots of CPU. After battling it for some time, decided to swap to Opera (still can’t stand the lag in opening a new tab in IE7 (is a bit faster with latest Vista RTM though) and also IE7 does not have mouse guestures or a download manager. Well what can I say Opera just works, not as many add-ons but quite a lot of the key ones I use are built in, e.g. mouse guestures, downloads, re-start where I left off. Memory is stable, CPU is stable, so (at least for now) I am an Opera user!
Comment by Simon Wilson — November 30, 2006 @ 6:34 am PST
I’ve seen the same from Firefox. I don’t ever leave the stupid browser up but I like my extensions too much to switch. From a stability point of view with features, I prefer Opera. It hasn’t failed me yet and it’s got to be one of the most stable browsers out there. Definitely the least load time when it comes to PDAs and such.
The whole memory leak issue is annoying. Of course, if you use IE, you’re setting yourself up with that ActiveX stuff. *sigh*
Comment by darkmoon — November 30, 2006 @ 10:12 am PST
It’s not a memory leak, it’s a poor choice of configuration options that Firefox ships with.
Here, I wrote you up a guide on what settings to configure to get it under control:
http://engtech.wordpress.com/2006/12/02/how-to-fix-the-firefox-memory-leak-firefox-hack/
Cheers.
Comment by engtech — December 2, 2006 @ 11:54 am PST
Hi engtech - thanks, I’ll give that a try following your settings. I remember configuring these settings in 1.5. Hey, do know if these settings work in Flock too (still based on Mozilla base), do you know? I’m going to try them there first since I’m using that one at the moment more than Firefox 2.x.
Comment by TDavid — December 2, 2006 @ 12:21 pm PST
engtech - your guide only goes up to 1GB RAM, this box has 2GB. I used the 15,000 (1GB specs). I was changed all the fields in Flock, closed, restarted and am tracking how it goes there. Flock was going up to 110MB+ like Firefox with default installation too, but at least it had some built-in tools.
Comment by TDavid — December 2, 2006 @ 12:32 pm PST
Just did a search for about:config here and see I wrote about this back in December 2004. It was back when people were complaining about Firefox performing sluggishly. Not sure if those settings have been obsoleted or not now.
Comment by TDavid — December 2, 2006 @ 12:36 pm PST
Heh. Those settings won’t fix your issue. If you look at the settings themselves, they’re involved with caching and prefetch. For your current scenario where you just have a tab open to a page, there shouldn’t be any changes to memory usage. Unless Firefox is going and prefetching other pages for the hell of it, and caching multiple copies of the current page in your test, which it doesn’t.
I’ve tested static configurations of both 2.0 and 1.5 in both Linux and Windows. Both of them balloon up regardless.
The scenarios that engtech is describing really only helps those people that are surfing a lot. Doesn’t help anything else.
Comment by darkmoon — December 2, 2006 @ 12:37 pm PST
Well actually, I do work and open/close other tabs throughout the course of the day, darkmoon. The overnight no activity memory gobbling though clearly is some sort of leak.
I don’t know how many levels the prefetching goes though. If it just keeps going and going to new pages that’s going to gobble memory. It should only prefetch the next page and not go any deeper than that. How would it know what links I would click beyond the links on the page. Without inspecting the source (which I’m trying to avoid doing in this experiment), I have no way of knowing absolutely for certain if this is how the prefetching is working.
On the positive side, I did notice when I removed all the add-ons it improved considerably, so clearly most of my problems were caused by (poorly coded) add-ons. There’s still no reason a browser should be using over 100MB with 5-7 tabs open. That’s over double the usage of any other program I have running. It was absolutely insane though when I was running out of memory with 2GB of RAM.
Comment by TDavid — December 2, 2006 @ 12:46 pm PST
Right, but with your current test, you’re just leaving a window with 1 or two tabs open in both browsers right? Firefox shouldn’t balloon at all. No browser should. Prefetch settings are usually 1 link deep, or if you have smart-prefetch algorithms, then it is based on historical data on how far you go into a site.
I could be wrong, but I don’t believe that Firefox has smart-prefetch. In any case, either of them shouldn’t change the test results. I do know that extensions have been a bane for memory loss in the past for Firefox and it continues to do so.
One of the curious things currently is I wonder how they open the tabs. With 1.5G of memory, I don’t usually get sluggish until about 30+ tabs open. But I don’t run as many extensions. Perhaps the tab code isn’t as optimized as it could be. Either way, there’s still some leak in Firefox since … like you said… it shouldn’t do anything if you leave it up overnight.
Comment by darkmoon — December 2, 2006 @ 12:58 pm PST
Oh. One single exception. Gmail type sites. It refreshes the page automatically so you could be chewing up some resources since it’s technically active by itself. But if so, you should see the same thing happen if you open the same sites on IE. Both browsers do prefetching, so you would expect similar results unless it’s HTML markup prefetch.
Comment by darkmoon — December 2, 2006 @ 1:02 pm PST
Currently the tests I’m running are with 5-7 tabs open (Gmail is one of them) and zero extensions installed. Flock is currently consuming 76,000k. Was restarted 30 minutes or so ago (12/2/06 9:30am PST) after implementing all of engtech’s suggested changes. In all my IE7 tests (no add-ons installed there either) it rarely went over 70,000k and averaged under 50,000. For all its activex weaknesses, IE7 has admittedly performed the best so far in my tests with a default installation and no add-ons.
Flock started at 46,000k with no extensions installed and one tab open. Currently Second Life is my second most memory consuming application running at 62,000 minimized. When maximized that program shoots up to 90,000-125,000k.
This all seems very strange and lazy to me — throwback programmer from the Vic-20/C-64 days — when we had bytes to work with, not megabytes. It just blows my mind how much memory waste there are with some programs these days.
Comment by TDavid — December 2, 2006 @ 1:20 pm PST
Go figure that. My background is in embedded systems, so I suppose it’s the closest to justifying minimal memory usage. It’s also why I quit doing it. Sometimes the digital logic and assembly just gets tiring. Optimization is key, but it seems that these days people don’t do it at all or are sloppy with it.
Comment by darkmoon — December 3, 2006 @ 11:05 am PST
[…] Browserwar.info tracks votes for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Lately, after fixes to the memory leak issues, I’ve been using Firefox more than the other browsers. Some of the comments from the different browser fans are interesting. […]
Pingback by Browser wars: which do you use most often? » Make You Go Hmm — March 14, 2007 @ 9:56 am PST
I love using Firefox, but the memory problem has been driving me nuts. Some people tell me it’s cache/pre-fetch thing but if it is, it is extremely poorly implemented as my computer with 1 gig of memory swaps like mad with firefox taking over 400 megabytes with 4 tabs. I recently switched to Opera and while I don’t like the overall interface and speed of Opera as much as Firefox, it’s just amazing how much more memory Firefox uses.
Comment by simonk — March 23, 2007 @ 2:27 am PST
I have a problem wit Firefox 2 and McAfee Site Advisor,
by startup firefox 2 webbrower dss1.siteadvisor.com and
sadowload.mcfee.com let haning system and wait 4 or 6 second
not respond. McAfee Site Advisor Plugin is unreliable.
Jeroen Roland
Comment by jeroen roland — April 13, 2008 @ 8:30 am PST