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Firefox is experiencing a huge memory leak which persists after reinstallation. After 5 minutes, browser is consuming 15+ GB of RAM.

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  • 2 have this problem
  • 6 views
  • Last reply by FredMcD

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I'm using selenium webdriver with Firefox to download a large amount of content. After 5 minutes or so and visiting roughly 20-30 pages, Firefox's memory consumption balloons to over 15 GB of RAM or more. I've tried setting preferences to allow no caching, no history retention, etc. At one point I had 20+ GB of RAM in the page file, making my computer run horrendously slow. Note that I'm running an older version of Firefox because of Selenium, but problem persists with newest version (outside of selenium) as well.

I'm on Mac OS X 10.11 (fully updated) and running 32 GB of RAM. I viewed the console and Firefox cites a possible memory leak:

firefox-bin[3875]: notify name "com.apple.system.powersources.timeremaining" has been registered 20 times - this may be a leak

Earlier today, I had the same message with over 1200 registrations. I've tried to find this file to delete it but have not been successful.

Help?!

I'm using selenium webdriver with Firefox to download a large amount of content. After 5 minutes or so and visiting roughly 20-30 pages, Firefox's memory consumption balloons to over 15 GB of RAM or more. I've tried setting preferences to allow no caching, no history retention, etc. At one point I had 20+ GB of RAM in the page file, making my computer run horrendously slow. Note that I'm running an older version of Firefox because of Selenium, but problem persists with newest version (outside of selenium) as well. I'm on Mac OS X 10.11 (fully updated) and running 32 GB of RAM. I viewed the console and Firefox cites a possible memory leak: firefox-bin[3875]: notify name "com.apple.system.powersources.timeremaining" has been registered 20 times - this may be a leak Earlier today, I had the same message with over 1200 registrations. I've tried to find this file to delete it but have not been successful. Help?!

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Let’s do a full clean re-install; Download Firefox For All languages And Systems {web link} Save the file. Then;

Using your file browser, open the Programs Folder on your computer.

Windows: C:\Program Files C:\Program Files (x86) Mac: Open the "Applications" folder. Linux: Check your user manual.

Do Not remove the profiles folder.

Look for, and rename any Mozilla or Firefox program folders by adding .old to them. Do not rename the Mozilla Thunderbird folder.

After rebooting the computer, run a registry scanner. Then run the installer. If all goes well, remove the OLD folders when you are done.


If there is a problem, start your Computer in safe mode and try again.

Starting The Computer In Safe Mode;
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