We're calling on all EU-based Mozillians with iOS or iPadOS devices to help us monitor Apple’s new browser choice screens. Join the effort to hold Big Tech to account!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Denc nañu waxtaan wii. Yónneel yeneen laaj soo soxlaa ndimbal.

Firefox 3.6.13 has a terrible memory leak

  • 3 tontu
  • 136 am na jafe-jafe bii
  • 21 views
  • i mujjee tontu mooy hansfn

plnelson
plnelson
more options

When I first start up Firefox it consumes < 100MB. After a few hours of browsing and other work it's over a gig. If I leave it up all day it's almost 2 gig - and my PC has only 2GB, which means everything starts paging like crazy. The only way to release it is to shut down all instances of the firefox.exe process. And when you do that it takes a long time because firefox has to release all that memory back to the system.

People are complaining about this all over the web and some people say "it's not firefox, it's the add-ons" but that's a cop-out because it's the firefox.exe process that's taking the memory. This means firefox provides the sandbox for the add-ons to run in so it can control their resource allocations.

When I first start up Firefox it consumes < 100MB. After a few hours of browsing and other work it's over a gig. If I leave it up all day it's almost 2 gig - and my PC has only 2GB, which means everything starts paging like crazy. The only way to release it is to shut down all instances of the firefox.exe process. And when you do that it takes a long time because firefox has to release all that memory back to the system. People are complaining about this all over the web and some people say "it's not firefox, it's the add-ons" but that's a cop-out because it's the firefox.exe process that's taking the memory. This means firefox provides the sandbox for the add-ons to run in so it can control their resource allocations.

All Replies (3)

hansfn
hansfn
more options

I have also noticed this memory leak. To be sure it wasn't my extensions, I launched Firefox with an profile with no extension. The memory leak was still very much present.

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

Did you check that there weren't any extensions installed in the new profile?

Plugins also can cause issues like that, so you can check that as well.

hansfn
hansfn
more options

Yes, I double-checked.

I did some testing:

1) Launching Firefox - 36 MB 2) Opening some random sites in 3-4 tabs and moving around on the sites (for an hour) - 168 MB 3) Closing all tabs, just leaving one empty tab - down to 116 MB, but staying there.

This is on Windows XP.