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Memory Usage

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I have a PC with 6GB of ram. I went to take a nap and Firefox usage was around 600MB. Without doing anything, when I woke up, Firefox usage was around 1.5GB of RAM. And it's slow. about:memory reports memory mapped to be 1,557,135,360 and memory in use to be 1,475,334,016. The only tabs open are Facebook, Google Voice, Google Calendar, and 6 text only (non scripted) sites. If I don't restart firefox myself, eventually it will crash...

This happened

A few times a week

Has always been this way...

User Agent

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.375.99 Safari/533.4

I have a PC with 6GB of ram. I went to take a nap and Firefox usage was around 600MB. Without doing anything, when I woke up, Firefox usage was around 1.5GB of RAM. And it's slow. about:memory reports memory mapped to be 1,557,135,360 and memory in use to be 1,475,334,016. The only tabs open are Facebook, Google Voice, Google Calendar, and 6 text only (non scripted) sites. If I don't restart firefox myself, eventually it will crash... == This happened == A few times a week == Has always been this way... == == User Agent == Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.375.99 Safari/533.4

All Replies (3)

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Couple quick things I didn't put in the original. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit edition. This problem has always been there, but seems to be getting worse in the last couple months. I often come back from somewhere to find that firefox has crashed.

I believe Facebook to be the problem, as it's one of the sites that I always have open. The rest of them change fairly regularly, but facebook is the one common tab throughout all of them. Call it a gut feeling, but I think flash might be a big part of the problem (and there's a lot of flash in Facebook), as things like youtube have always been choppy in Firefox, even though it's a core2duo 3.0GHz with 6GB of RAM and a 768MB video card... It's not choppy in Chrome or in IE, so it's a firefox issue...

I have attached a screenshot of about:memory to this reply to show my concern. However, it'd be very nice to have something better like a "meminfo" or something that tells me HOW that 1.5GB of ram is being used... Breaking it down by cache, per plugin, etc, etc. That would let me know where to look for a problem.

For a browser who has had a history of complaints about memory usage and memory leaks, there's surprisingly NO memory usage reporting available that I can find to detect said problems...

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913.104 K used. Like 2 pages opened, no plugin-container.exe working. What's the matter? Using Firefox 3.6.6 aka "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100625 Firefox/3.6.6"

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5 days and not even a suggestion? *sigh*

What about approaching this from another angle... Is there a way to tell Firefox that under no circumstances is it to use more than X amount of memory? I've seen Firefox run well on machines with 512MB of ram, so if I can set a hard limit of, say, 256MB of RAM for Firefox, then it'll be forced to clean itself up more often...

Thoughts?