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Firefox eating excessive memory (highest I've observed it was 3.5 GB)

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  • 10 have this problem
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  • Last reply by ideato

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Upon start up my FireFox goes right up to over 130KB of ram, which is already a lot. Over a period of 45 mins to an hour, its consuming an entire 1GB of memory. Left unchecked it goes over TWO GB. One time I even saw it eating 3.5 GB and had my entire system running at a snails pace. That is beyond excessive. I've seen other posts about memory usage but none on this huge of a scale. If I can't fix it I won't use FireFox anymore.

Upon start up my FireFox goes right up to over 130KB of ram, which is already a lot. Over a period of 45 mins to an hour, its consuming an entire 1GB of memory. Left unchecked it goes over TWO GB. One time I even saw it eating 3.5 GB and had my entire system running at a snails pace. That is beyond excessive. I've seen other posts about memory usage but none on this huge of a scale. If I can't fix it I won't use FireFox anymore.

All Replies (3)

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hello, i agree that this totally unacceptable memory consumption. there have been many efforts going on of reducing the core browser's memory footprint - most of these excessive leaks are caused by extensions in the browser - which ones do you have installed in firefox > addons > extensions? (changes will be implemented in firefox 15 to dramatically reduce the possibility of memory leaks by these 3rd party programs).

you can also try launching firefox in safemode and see if it's working normally. if so, you'd have to try disabling all extensions, reenabling them one by one again & then observing the behaviour of the browser again to find out what's causing it.

Diagnose Firefox issues using Troubleshoot Mode

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You can also check for problems caused by plugins (those aren't disabled in Safe mode).

See also;

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See also : High memory usage , and update java to latest 6.32.


thank you