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i kept firefox 1.5 running for 2 days, with at most 9 tabs. when i opened up a abiword document, the computer started skipping badly. gkrellm showed that i had 1M swap free. i closed abiword, and it was still the same. then i closed firefox, and after some 100% cpu usage, i got 600MB free (490+ ram, rest swap).
any of you guys with the same problem? what does top show for firefox 1.5 mem usage?
there is a "bug" where certain plugins will cause firefox to request RAM and then not give it back when it is done. there are simple "fixes" available for this if you google for it.
I'll have to agree, despite being full featured, Firefox is a memory and CPU hoard. On my Pentium 1 Laptop I use Dillo mostly. On my Pentium 2 I use Opera. Yeah I know its not open source but it runs smoother on these lower resource machines (plus they have debian repositories so I'm happy). There's my 2 cents. :)
couldn't find it yet. could you give a link? all i found was this:Quote:
there are simple "fixes" available for this if you google for it.
http://i.cmpnet.com/pipeline-shared/.../ff_memory.jpg
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=175007152
and does anyone else have this problem with version 1.5: when you drag and drop tabs (in linux, gtk2), the browser freezes and you cant click on anything inthe screen? i have this problem in both slackware and fedora in 2 pcs. doesnt happen with 1.0.7
This doesn't happen on my SuSE 9.2 distro.
As a workaround you could try installing the Sessionsaver extension and closing then restarting Firefox every once in a while to free up some RAM. Sessionsaver can save what you were doing and restore all your tabs the way they were when restart Firefox so you won't lose anything.
half a year past, and they still haven't fixed this memory problem. instead of spending so much money on silly ads, they should pay programmers to fix this major memory leak.
I haven't had any memory problems with firefox on my laptop. It uses quite lot of memory (more than Xorg), but no matter how long i run it. It doesn't make a difference.
I think the memory leak problem has something to do with flash plugin. On my other system I used to get the exact same problem you are mentioning (or atleast something very similar) firefox memleak would cause it run out of memory, then swap and cause system to nearly freeze. After i apt-got a new version of flash plugin the problem went away.Code:PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
6534 ladoga 15 0 145m 67m 20m S 0.0 4.5 6:22.52 firefox-bin
6167 root 15 0 317m 51m 5032 S 0.0 3.4 2:46.43 Xorg
Have you tried to see if it happens without extensions (just a wild guess) and flash plugin installed?
I, from time to time, have the same problem with firefox. Have for sometime now. It doesn't seem to be at the top of their list to fix soooooo I have learned to live with it. It happens on windows as well. I have just learned to close firefox when I walk away from my computer. Earlier it was eating over 300MBs for 3 tabs.
the developers have been able to find and fix a healthy number of memory leaks -- like 19 or so in whats the trunk now and will be a part of firefox3 as best i can tell.
they have also fixed about 12 other leaks that are done earlier upstream and will be in firefox2.
the testers have some leak tools now so hopefully less new leaks introduced.
they can't do anything about leaky plugins and extensions however
I've gotten ff on my windwos machine to use approx 800 mb of ram, fortunatly I have a gig on the machine. But running iTunes in conjuntion, which also tends to need a lot of memory but not leeks I've noticed yet, tends to cause issues when needing to open an email client...Oh well, viruse free, adware free, so forth, so a mem leak isn't going to kill me right now.