Firefox on Windows is really bad, the Linux binaries don’t seem to have problems like this, or at least not as terrible as the Windows versions.
As I was reviewing the comments, I must have missed the answer to the original question Thijs put forth: “did you try the Firefox-safe-mode to see if any plugins you are using is causing trouble?”
Some add-ons, such as AdBlocker, had known memory leaks that have already been fixed.
Open up your extenstions list and click the button labeled “Find Updates”. Update every single extension if you can. I find that FF never gets the latest versions of any of my extensions, even though I told it to automatically check for updates.
Maybe the SAVE SESSION https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=436application=firefox
add-on will help.
There is a much better solution to Firefox: SeaMonkey.
Brief history: When firefox was pre-1.0 it was alawys assumed by the MoFo that all the old Mozilla devs would ‘switch over’ to Firefox when it became “stable”; that they were only ‘maintaining’ Mozilla 1.7 and perfecting Gecko (which firefox uses for rendering).
Well, after it went 1.0 the MoFo devs looked at the 50,000 known at the time (seriously) memleaks, lack of structured planning, lack of coding standards, etc. and went “what a piece of trash.” Not a single MoFo dev stayed. Instead, over time they developed SeaMonkey which is now very very stable.
SeaMonkey has virtually every single feature of Firefox (including extensions and support for a great many Firefox extensions) but NONE OF THE DOWNSIDES. It is developed by the same people that develop the Gecko rendering engine and they are far more professional coders to boot. I know; I have reviewed both FF and SM codebases.
For more information, see my research study Firefox vs SeaMonkey vs Mozilla vs IE vs Opera (a href="http://www.incendiary.ws/node/177)."http://www.incendiary.ws/node/177)./a Since then, SeaMonkey has improved while Firefox has continued to leak.
Hey Guys,
why is this???
When I go to this URL : about:cache?device=memory
Then I see some of the GIF images normally taking up 1Kb reserving a space of 250000 bytes
Key: <a href="http://www.domain.com/typo3/gfx/alt_topmenu_back_dummy.gif">http://www.domain.com/typo3/gfx/alt_topmenu_back_dummy.gif</a>
Data size: 250000 bytes
Fetch count: 1
Last modified: 2006-04-26 21:10:52
Expires: 2006-04-28 15:46:41
Key: <a href="http://script.aculo.us/images/logo.gif">http://script.aculo.us/images/logo.gif</a>
Data size: 313720 bytes
Fetch count: 15
Last modified: 2006-04-26 14:37:58
Expires: 2006-05-02 01:11:04
Why is the data size so huge?
Or are they counting the bits? 
What could be the prob with that?
Ries
setting the following to 0 seems to work well…
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
mine floats around 60mb with about 10 tabs open, most of them containing ajax/c-panel pages (constantly updating stats…)
the minimize function seems to help masses… knocks it down to around 50mb but then it creeps up again.
oh… anybody noticed that as soon as you open a java applet your mem jumps up by about 200mb???
This type of thing has been happening with Firefox forever with me, whether I have add-ons or not (I think). I am surprised I’ve been putting up with it for that long, and I am getting motivated to find something else. I too have had to keep seeing the “Virtual Memory Low” warning from Windows, and I have 512 Meg here. More oddly, I very often find that even though all Firefox windows have been shut, a Firefox process is still shown running, often at rather high memory, in the Task Manager. My computer is whirring dealing with the memory, and as soon as I close that phantom Firefox process all returns to normal. IRRITATING.
SeaMonkey, as the other poster said, might be better based on his stats (though I thought it looked very like a return to 1999 Netscape-ville). I am now just trying out Opera. I’m already annoyed that they ignore Fitts Law and put the all important back button with an annoying 20 pixel or so border to the left of it so that you can’t just mouse to the hard left of the screen and push the button–dumb!!
That issue is freaking me out. All those workarounds wasnt good for me. If I had to remove plugins, why am I using Firefox ? Firefox is good because its customizations that came from plugins.
If wasnt some exclusive plugins I would be using Opera whole time.
TIP-how to minimize your firefox memory usage
- On the website url toolbar type about:config
- A page full of words will come up. right click anywhere and choose New - Boolean
- For the name input type config.trim_on_minimize
- Select True
- Restart FireFox.
- Ctrl + alt + del (this opens your task manager)
- Go to process and choose your Firefox process (usually called firefox.exe)
- Look at the Memory Usage Column (average is 20,000-40,000)
- Now minimise firefox and you will see the memory usage to be less than 10,000
I was testing this on my 3ghz cpu, 2gb ram, HP machine. I have been noticing this incredible lag for days. So I did some testing. When I am using FF I always have my gmail open and an igoogle page. Those are two tabs that are essential for me. Well, what I found was that when I was using the NEWEST version of GMAIL my CPU usage was hitting 50% plus pretty consistently and the MEM usage ranged from 105k to 210k. BUT when I switched to the OLDER version of GMAIL and left it open my CPU usage bottomed out and only spiked when I opened new tabs or emails in GMAIL. MEM usage stayed around 120k pretty consistently as well without ranging too much in the upper register. I can’t believe that Gmail is such a culprit in this little affair though. I’m surfing much smoother now. Give it a try. Try switching from the newer and older versions of gmail with the task manager opened. you’ll see a crazy difference.
this fucking works, dumbasses!
Big thanks for help !
I’ll third (fifth, ninth, whatever) the call to point the finger at plugins.
I have a situation where firefox is eating memory even when I don’t do anything. Sometimes (and it’s unfortunately not reproducable on demand) I’ll leave firefox running with no loaded page and go home for the night. In the morning, I’ll find that firefox memory usage has balooned to over 500MB. Without any user doing anything! (So obviously it’s not the 8-cached-pages “feature” that the mozilla folks are talking about.)
But then, I did as people suggested and uninstalled all my plugins and over the course of two weeks, firefox memory usage behaved. I then put all my plugins back in and the problem resurfaced.
Now, I run over a dozen plugins so I haven’t bothered to install them one at a time and try to find out which one is the problem. I just shut down firefox at the end of each day.
So, I think that the real bug report to file with mozilla is that they need to put in place some sort of limits and checks on plugin memory usage.
I am not having these problems at all on a Windows install at all.
What extensions are installed? With that amount of memory used, I would say there is a pretty good probability you are just using an extension that leaks memory. That “add-on ecosystem” has a downside. Start Firefox in safe mode and reproduce this, or figure out what leaky add-ins are causing this.