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November 19, 2004
Memory leak
I'm just throwing this out to see if anyone else who uses Firefox has
noticed the same problem. I'm thinking it has a memory leak
somewhere. I notice my machine start to slow, the response
getting sluggish. At this moment for instance, Firefox has
242,636K of Mem usage. That just seems wrong for 1 window, 7
tabs, none running java or applets or anything complex.
I find that I occasionally have to close it, let the memory release and
then it is okay again for a few more hours, perhaps a day.
Is it just moi?
**Update:
I tried the change mentioned in the comments section and it did help somewhat. I have recently changed machines and operating systems. I am using Firefox 1.0 with XP and no longer have the memory leak issue.
**Update Feb 2005. I stand corrected. It hasn't gone away, it just takes longer to eat up all of my available virtual memory. I have made the about:config change mentioned below in the comments, but that only seems to delay the need to close Firefox entirely. I'm really hoping the new beta version solves this issue.
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» Firefox memory leak from Commune
I find two problems in Mozilla Firefox very troublesome: Firefox has many memory leaks. After opening up multiple tabs and windows, and then slowly reducing them, the memory usage doesnt go down. At this point I have 7 taps open... [Read More]
Tracked on Nov 24, 2004 8:20:06 PM
» Firefox Memory Leak from nodomain.cc
Irgendwie ist es mir noch nie so deutlich aufgefallen: gerade ein paar Stunden mit FF im Netz unterwegs, 7 Tabs offen und das Ding braucht laut Windows Taskmanager 254.835K Arbeitsspeicher. Der Browser reagiert zäh, langsam, zum Kotzen.
Damit sich mein [Read More]
Tracked on Jun 1, 2005 5:58:36 AM
Comments
At work I have an XP box with Firefox. In general, the thing is slow on the net, even with DSL. I see it in my parents computer (xp also) going slow with FF. I, on the other hand, have on my personal machine FF with 2k and another with 98... it buzzes along without skipping a beat. I think it may be the way FF interacts with XP, if that's what you're using.
Posted by: Rebe | Nov 19, 2004 6:33:57 PM
My O/S is 2000. IT speeds right up again if I close it and open a fresh session. It just degrades over time.
Posted by: jo | Nov 19, 2004 7:26:32 PM
i cant help you with this(typical man lol) but i just thought i would make a post just to say hi.
still in a northern town complete with accent lol.
i am reading a book called :subject about which i know nothing - which makes me a world authority in the subject as i know plenty of nothing hee hee.
chat soon xx
Posted by: Stuart | Nov 20, 2004 11:56:17 PM
I'm having a memory leak too, but it has absolutely nothing to do with my computer and everything to do with my noggin'.
Posted by: Karan | Nov 22, 2004 7:55:34 PM
*hits head and shouts eureka!*
I hadn't put the two together but I've just realised that the memory problems started the day after installing 1.0 (I'm on Win2K). I'm not overly concerned, thinking it's a small price to pay for a great browser but I'm just going to see if anyone else has mentioned it.
p.s. You're number one in google for "firefox memory leak" :-0)
p.p.s. still chuckling at Karan's reply.
Posted by: Daisy | Nov 24, 2004 7:06:07 AM
I find Firefox so slow that I can't be bothered with it - except to check that everything is OK on my blog occasionally. It was better before I installed 1.0 though. I really find it hard to know why everyone raves about it.
It may be slow because of the memory usage as my voice recognition software is very resource hungry, but I don't have the problem with IE.
Posted by: Blue Witch | Nov 24, 2004 1:15:42 PM
As far as I can tell Firefox never releases any memory EVER. I've got one tab open with two pages on the history stack and the virtual size is 140 MB (!) and it's got over 100 MB of physical memory tied up. That's absurd!!
p.s. Still #1 in Google for firefox memory leak.
Posted by: Tom | Dec 2, 2004 7:10:13 PM
I've noticed the same thing, but only on windoze 2000, which I have at work. It slows down to a crawl, even with only a few tabs open. At home, where I have XP, it works like a dream.
Posted by: Mathew | Dec 6, 2004 6:30:34 PM
Check out http://www.windowssecrets.com/041202/ for a recipe to fix at least one memory leak. Maybe other info you can use.
Posted by: joat | Dec 6, 2004 10:14:43 PM
non ce n'est pas juste toi...
When I check firefox memory usage in the processes table it gets bigger and bigger although I close tabs.
Posted by: tao | Dec 9, 2004 9:51:07 AM
And all of this time, I was beginning to think that the Firefox memory leaks was just something I noticed. Seems like Google told me different.
I like Firefox and I use it daily. That's probably the only issue that I ahve with it. Even with a Gig of RAM, it still manages to shut down Windows XP. I know it's finally the 1.0 release, but this is something I feel should be fixed ASAP.
Firefox will easy take up 200 MB of RAM even after you close it. I have Portable Firefox running on my USB drive. Even after I closed it, I noticed that there were two more instances of it running taking up about 64 MB of RAM each.
Strange, but true ...
Posted by: Taj Williams | Dec 9, 2004 12:48:33 PM
This is a known bug and there is a pretty good work around.
1. Type about:config in the address bar
2. Right Click on the page and add a New Integer...
3. For the name enter browser.cache.memory.capacity
4. For the value enter 1600
5. Restart Firefox
6. Enjoy even more the great browser!
This tip came from Secrets of Firefox web page
Posted by: Dan Cramer | Dec 16, 2004 4:38:38 PM
Yes, I do find that Firefox slows down quite a lot after sometime, usually about an hour or so - I am on Windows 2000. I have been seeing this behaviour from the time I started trying Firefox (version 0.8 or so). I still see it on 1.0. Today I just thought I would see if others have come across this problem, so I searched on Google, and this was the first site I saw.
BTW, I tried the suggestion on browser.cache.memory.capacity, but I could not find that entry in the list. I could only find browser.cache.memory.enable. This is on version 1.0.
Posted by: Raajesh Kashyap | Dec 23, 2004 12:10:24 PM
OK.. I had mis-read the suggestion on browser.cache.memory.capacity. Obviously, I was to add a new entry. I did that and I now find Firefox working perfectly! Thanks!!
Note: I found that this tip is now also available in the Firefox "Tips & Tricks" page on the Mozilla web site.
Posted by: Raajesh Kashyap | Dec 24, 2004 2:56:42 PM
Thank you Raajesh, I'm going to try your suggestion this afternoon and see if it helps.
Posted by: jo | Dec 24, 2004 3:36:17 PM
Note that when you add that attribute you want to set it to ~16,000 not 1600.
read the original tip...
Posted by: OOri | Dec 27, 2004 9:16:27 PM
I too have found the memory leak issue on my machine running Win2K Pro SP4. I am glad about the workaround. Now that I have found it, I will fix it.
Thanks for all your posts! A browser should eventually be more stable than having such memory leaks.
Posted by: AGoldstein | Jan 17, 2005 12:27:52 AM
The workaround doesn't work for me on W2K Pro SP4. I heard that the Gecko engine from Mozilla 1.7.8 would fix this in Firefox 1.1 -- where do they publish upcoming release dates?
Posted by: DRB | Feb 5, 2005 12:04:40 PM
I went on a page with 90 large images and firefox reads 717,968K, I close that page and opens the next one with another 90+ large images, and firefox reads 1,545,944K.
I opened a similar page with IE, it only eats 427,852K, it's only 60% of what Firefox needs. Besides once I closed the page the memory is released. I am thinking about switching back to IE6 after using firefox for 3 months, very disappointed with the memory leak.
I guess I will read the Secrets of Firefox page first and see if I can fix this problem.
Posted by: bmouth | Mar 19, 2005 11:15:34 PM
I see the same memory leak in Firefox as everyone else is seeing, but sometimes not.
I actively fight spammers by consuming their bandwidth, if I run the SpamVampire, it sucks up memory like crazy, but if I use the 'Reload Every' plugin for Firefox to simply reload spamvertised websites every 5 seconds or so, then Firefox remains steady at around 37MB of memory usage.
The memory leak pertains to image loading, so it's not surprising that SpamVampire causes it to suck up a lot of memory, but I'm not sure why memory consumption in Firefox remains steady when continually reloading web pages (and the images on those web pages) using the 'Reload Every' plugin.
I've got the browser cache completely disabled, both the memory cache and disk cache, so images aren't cached at all, so Firefox shouldn't be consuming more memory over time, but it still does.
I sure hope they fix this soon.
Posted by: SpamSlayer | Mar 27, 2005 11:48:20 PM
Not a solution to the memory leaks, but I found at least a great easy for the pain of having to restart the browser, the SessionSaver extension!
"SessionSaver will auto-track and restore your browser exactly as you left it -- every startup, every time. Not even a crash can phase it: window-positions, tab-histories, cookies + scrolling -- all saved."
Everything is restored -- except for the allocated memory!
Posted by: Peter | Apr 19, 2005 4:59:06 PM
My recommendation would be to set browser.cache.memory.capacity to zero, and run off the hard disk cache alone.
Posted by: Mark | May 25, 2005 11:17:06 PM
...or, set browser.cache.memory.enable to "False", since Firefox seems to ignore the value in .capacity.
Posted by: Mark | May 25, 2005 11:17:48 PM
I have tried ALL the suggestions and still have a memory leak in FF. When I'm surfing picture intensive websites, it happens in about 10 minutes. It ends up using 99% of my resources. I have XP SP2 and 1 GB RAM. I don't think my computer is lacking. I have also uninstalled and re-installed, and yes, I have the latest version of everything. It is some esoteric problem, and sooner or later, I will figure it out, as I really like FF and now hate using I.E.
Posted by: cliff | Jun 4, 2005 10:51:53 PM
This memory leak seems to be caused by FF not removing closed tabs from memory, thus eating it up as you go. So I thought I'd take a closer look at the cache settings in about:config.
When I start up FF 1.04 on WinXP, I'm looking at a memory usage of about 27MB. Fine. Now if only it would stay there, right?
I tried setting the following variables to false before restarting FF to see what happened:
browser.cache.disk.enable = false
browser.cache.memory.enable = false
(I also have browser.cache.disk.capacity = 0 because I'm using Portable Firefox. I will have to try the above when I get home.)
So I opened up 15 tabs, whatever I could, including PDFs and the like. I hit about 46MB of memory usage. I then proceeded to close them one by one and watched the memory usage drop to about 37MB.
I just now opened and closed about 20-25 tabs, saw mem go up to 80MB, closed them and watched it come down to 53MB.
Now while this obviously isn't a total solution since you'd think that the usage would drop back down to 26MB as when it started, it certainly is nice to see it dropping. Period. Who needs browsing cache anyways, right?
If you try this, please leave your feedback.
Steve
Posted by: Steve | Jun 22, 2005 2:30:08 PM
