Comments on: Upgraded to Firefox 2.x, sill leaking memory like crazy

By: jeroen roland

jeroen roland — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:30:50 +0000

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

By: simonk

simonk — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 09:27:27 +0000

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.

By: Browser wars: which do you use most often? » Make You Go Hmm

Browser wars: which do you use most often? » Make You Go Hmm — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:56:44 +0000

[…] 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. […]

By: darkmoon

darkmoon — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 16:05:28 +0000

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.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 18:20:56 +0000

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.

By: darkmoon

darkmoon — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 18:02:32 +0000

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.

By: darkmoon

darkmoon — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 17:58:46 +0000

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.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 17:46:37 +0000

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.

By: darkmoon

darkmoon — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 17:37:45 +0000

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.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 17:36:53 +0000

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.