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Firefox memory

by Bruce Ure at 22:58 04/05/06 (Blogs::Bruce)

Good grief, I've seen it all now.

this machine, with a gig of ram in it, was going slower than usual just now so I checked task maanger to find that Firefox was using over 1,000,000 K of memory. Otherwise knows as about a gigabyte.

I googled and apparently this is a very well known issue with firefox, to do with page caching. You can disable it, or reduce it, but even starting FF up and doing fuck-all takes over 100 megs. i've some addons installed but 100 megs??

So I'm trying Opera; initial impressions are favourable.

(Yeah yeah, if i had a mac or linux, it'd only use 35K, i know)

<< Well I'll USB buggered

Why do turds...? >>

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Firefox memory	Bruce Ure - 22:58 04/05/06
-	Deleted User Account - 08:23 05/05/06
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Re: Firefox memory	Simon - 09:03 05/05/06
Firefox here is using 128MB real memory and 650MB virtual, but since this is a real operating system instead of the clockwork toy OS you've got, there's no problem at all ;-) -- simon
Re: Firefox memory	Bruce Ure - 09:33 05/05/06
nice try, mate :-) --
-	Deleted User Account - 09:04 05/05/06
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Re: Firefox memory	Bruce Ure - 09:38 05/05/06
there's no argument (well there is, but there shouldn't be). it's a feature, it's not memork leakage. the question is whether it's a sensible feature. i'd personally say they haven't given it enough thought, or else they have but they made a bad decision. they could do a lot to reduce memory consumption, eg. by setting a default max cache size based on installed ram rather than a flat '8 pages', and compressing bitmaps stored in cached pages rather than storing them uncompressed... i mean, ffs... opera seems nice, but i'm already missing bits of FF. --
Re: Firefox memory	Steve - 16:04 05/05/06
I use Camino. But then, like Simon, I'm using a real operating system. :-) -- stevepa
Re: Firefox memory	Simon - 16:29 05/05/06
How is Camino these days? I tried it a couple of years ago, but didn't get along with it very well. -- simon
Re: Firefox memory	Steve - 16:32 05/05/06
Works just fine. Mike Pinkerton and his folks have done a lot of good work on it, and they finally shipped a 1.0 release two months ago. It's a no-frills Gecko based browser that feels more like a native Mac OSX application than Firefox. -- stevepa
Re: Firefox memory	Simon - 16:54 05/05/06
Time I gave it another go then, I think. If Microsoft used the Gecko engine (and didn't fsck about with it in the process), 100% of my HTML/CSS problems would go away immediately. -- simon
Re: Firefox memory	Gordon Hundley - 06:32 06/05/06
I had a siutation where Firefox used enough VM to cause problems. When I killed it it was using 33GB. Although I had ~25 tabs open (a dozen is normal for me), I've had more without issue, so I expect a script went out of control. Even when its working well, its a bit of a spoiled bastard, and abuses far too much memory. I used to have pre 1.5 versions running for weeks. It gets quite sluggish on this 4GB G5 after only a few days of heavy use with 1.5. I was quite surprised to see Camino's progress when I checked it out a few weeks ago. At some point I'll get around to setting it up and seeing how it handles. -- DrGoon
Re: Firefox memory	Bruce Ure - 11:50 06/05/06
You've probably already discovered this, but if you go to about:config and change browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers from -1 to (say) 3, you'll suddenly stop losing all your memory to FF. It's completely transformed dozen-plus-tab browsing for me, from a lumbering behemoth to a lithe, er, something lithe, and I've not noticed any decline in back/forward performance whatsoever. --