Firefox leaking memory again?

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cyril7

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#30611 15-Feb-2009 10:33

Hi, I have used Firefox since it first appeared, and always put up with a certain level of memory leak, then about 9months ago they did a upgrade that seemed to fix that, it would get to about 140-150Mbyte of usage and sit there, then last week there was an upgrade and now its back to leaking again, leave it for a few hours with little or no browsing and its up to 350Mbyte and growing.
Anyone else found that, in the short term ive started using Chrome, not too bad either and comes in with a light foot of 40odd MByte.
Ohh and on XP SP3 all the lattest updates.
Cyril

grant_k

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#195883 15-Feb-2009 10:59

Hi There Cyril

I am using FireFox 3.0.6 with 23 tabs open. I just checked in Task Manager and the total memory usage is 153MB. This little laptop has only 512MB of RAM so I would surely notice if it was consuming 350MB.

Also running XP SP3 with all the latest updates released this week.

Probably doesn't help you, but that's my experience anyway.

Cheers,
Grant.

cyril7

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#195885 15-Feb-2009 11:21

Hi Grant, belated seasons greetings. Well its interesting, I see that Chrome has several processes running, a common one about 40MByte and one for each tab at around 25-30MByte, if you close a tab then one of the chrome processes close, so obviously to manage each tabs rendering they run a complete seperate process all controlled by a common stub process, guess it manages memory better.

Firefox starts at around 35MByte, but after 30min of running and only one tab with my Gmail on it its got to 77MByte and on the rise. Previously it would get to 150odd and stay there regardless of how many tabs I had open, but lately this is not the case. I understand that they never really solved the memory leaks, but simply implemented a cron (pardon the nix parlance) to run around every now and then and clean up the mess, maybe this has broken in my install.

And yes same FF3.0.6 and XP Pro SP3.

Cyril

Ragnor

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#195886 15-Feb-2009 11:22

What addons are you using for Firefox?

cyril7

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#195887 15-Feb-2009 11:25

ahhh, addons, good point Ragnor, last week a java update added java quick start as an addon, will disable it and see how we go. There are no other addons but quite a number of plug ins.
Cyril

Adamal

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#195972 16-Feb-2009 00:46

The memory leak was meant to be fixed with version 3, but I've noticed a couple of times where it has chewed up nearly a gig (!) of my memory. Most of the time, however, it stays around the ~150mb mark. That was before I used any plugins as well, such as Adblock Plus.

cyril7

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#195978 16-Feb-2009 06:59

Hi, well it seems to be related the Java fast start addon as its good with it off, but bloats out with it on, but what happens if I run a Java app, dont I end up back in the same situation, as I understand it a fast starter simply loads all the DLL's and most of the Java machine but leaves it way in the background twiddling its thumbs to save load time, which is much the same as running a Java app.

Ahh well, will keep an eye on it.

Cyril

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Ragnor

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#196028 16-Feb-2009 12:15

Probably but almost no common or popular websites use java so it won't matter much.

I would go uninstall every version of java (there's probably about 10 installed) and then just reinstall the latest one.

macrogeek

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#196411 17-Feb-2009 22:29

yea , iwas about to say the same thing with java web start , as it really maximize my ram usage when surfing some pages with my FF ... this problem is solved already i guess hehe :)

cyril7

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#196441 18-Feb-2009 07:54

Hi yes I have been running this lattest session since we last spoke and its been running between 152 and currently back down to 138 so alls good with the moppup cron, and its been running 24/7 with everyone using it (kitchen table laptop) including kids running heaps of flash mushi monster games. So definetly the java loader was an issue.

Many thanks for the suggestion.

Cyril