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Solution to Firefox 4 memory leak and hogging

  • 4 replies
  • 133 have this problem
  • 278 views
  • Last reply by firehog

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I got SO fed up with Firefox 3.6 using so much memory that I upgraded to Firefox 4 only to find the problem is WORSE.

Now before all you Firefox sycophants start saying it is the Add-On's, let me tell you that is BS and I will tell you why; because it is Firefox who is ultimately responsible for the program and at the very LEAST it should be able to give you a memory map of how much memory each tabs and each add-ons are using with an ability to terminate them.

The basic memory problem with Firefox is that it does is NOT release memory, so as you open more and more sites it gobbles up more and memory even if you close the tabs.

So after a few hours of busy browsing the memory usage is up to 900mb, yes 900mb, quite ridiculous, but if you load windows start manager and end the Firefox task, then reload Firefox it will load the same sites, but take up between 200mb and 300mb, so 600mb of wasted memory.

Now some of you might say, "why not zap Firefox and reload to recover memory" well because if you do you may lose your place on some sites and if you don't have your master password handy and ready to copy and paste QUICKLY, you will have to enter your master password for every tab.

What I wanted was a way of forcing Firefox to give up all this memory and I found one! It was an equally badly behaved Adobe Air application called Keyword Blueprint (KWBP), I got it free from http://www.miningmoneyonline.org/ as part of some free course to make money online (you just need an email, they try to get you to sign up for more but the download link is at the bottom). What KWBP does is evaluate google keywords and every time you tell it to evaluate another 10 keywords it gobbles more memory.

What was interesting was that once you got KWBP over 1gb of ram Firefox started shrinking it's memory usage, the more memory I got KWBP to use by evaluating more keywords, the more Firefox released memory. I kept doing this until KWBP terminated through lack of memory or Firefox had recovered enough memory to stop the pale white screen and slow performance. I then exited KWBP and proceeded.

It was not a great solution but it shows that Firefox is capable of releasing memory, (BTW you have to choose a very generic keyword in KWBP so that there are lots of keywords to evaluate, something like Lose Weight or Forex should do the trick).

So what we need now is a Firefox add-on or menu option that makes Firefox release this memory KWBP shows it is capable and it works better in Firefox 3.6 but the most important thing is that it shows this CAN be done.

So no more excuses Firefox, I don't want to start using Chrome or Internet Explorer 9, I like Firefox but I am really fed up with firefox at the same time.

Hope this helps.

Jan

I got SO fed up with Firefox 3.6 using so much memory that I upgraded to Firefox 4 only to find the problem is '''WORSE'''. Now before all you Firefox sycophants start saying it is the Add-On's, let me tell you that is BS and I will tell you why; because it is Firefox who is ultimately responsible for the program and at the very LEAST it should be able to give you a memory map of how much memory each tabs and each add-ons are using with an ability to terminate them. The basic memory problem with Firefox is that it does is NOT release memory, so as you open more and more sites it gobbles up more and memory even if you close the tabs. So after a few hours of busy browsing the memory usage is up to 900mb, yes 900mb, quite ridiculous, but if you load windows start manager and end the Firefox task, then reload Firefox it will load the same sites, but take up between 200mb and 300mb, so 600mb of wasted memory. Now some of you might say, "why not zap Firefox and reload to recover memory" well because if you do you may lose your place on some sites and if you don't have your master password handy and ready to copy and paste '''QUICKLY''', you will have to enter your master password for every tab. What I wanted was a way of forcing Firefox to give up all this memory and I found one! It was an equally badly behaved Adobe Air application called Keyword Blueprint (KWBP), I got it free from http://www.miningmoneyonline.org/ as part of some free course to make money online (you just need an email, they try to get you to sign up for more but the download link is at the bottom). What KWBP does is evaluate google keywords and every time you tell it to evaluate another 10 keywords it gobbles more memory. What was interesting was that once you got KWBP over 1gb of ram Firefox started shrinking it's memory usage, the more memory I got KWBP to use by evaluating more keywords, the more Firefox released memory. I kept doing this until KWBP terminated through lack of memory or Firefox had recovered enough memory to stop the pale white screen and slow performance. I then exited KWBP and proceeded. It was not a great solution but it shows that Firefox is capable of releasing memory, (BTW you have to choose a very generic keyword in KWBP so that there are lots of keywords to evaluate, something like Lose Weight or Forex should do the trick). So what we need now is a Firefox add-on or menu option that makes Firefox release this memory KWBP shows it is capable and it works better in Firefox 3.6 but the most important thing is that it shows this CAN be done. So no more excuses Firefox, I don't want to start using Chrome or Internet Explorer 9, I like Firefox but I am really fed up with firefox at the same time. Hope this helps. Jan

Modified by FedUp

All Replies (4)

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This is the before and after view of windows task manager showing 500mb of memory recovered, it is not always this effective but it demonstrates that Firefox can be made to give up the memory it is hogging.

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Everyone should just switch to Chrome browser. I also had problem of FF 4 using over 1gig of ram making my computer crawl.

Have been using chrome awhile now and memory usage never goes above 100mb no matter how many tabs are open. It also has developer tool that has almost all the features that firebug has. Going to chrome permanently. Tired of FF slowing me down.

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I can't switch entirely to Chrome because of some wonderful FF plugins. Anyways, I found the solution to the memory hogging problem by firefox here firefox memory hogging fix and now my firefox.exe is 420 MB instead of 1.2 GB.

Makes my system more usable, by A LOT.

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On my machine firehog 8 and thunderf**k 8

  • top - 20:51:39 up 57 days, 22:49, 17 users, load average: 0.54, 0.47, 0.45
  • Tasks: 177 total, 1 running, 174 sleeping, 0 stopped, 2 zombie
  • Cpu(s): 9.1%us, 6.3%sy, 1.2%ni, 83.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
  • Mem: 2005164k total, 1864168k used, 140996k free, 3100k buffers
  • Swap: 4088504k total, 282280k used, 3806224k free, 438204k cached
  • PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
  • 7229 user 1 0 999m 445m 22m S 1 22.7 209:39.23 firefox
  • 5572 user 1 0 898m 423m 14m S 0 21.6 143:51.94 thunderbird-bin

Half a gig each, just to show a blank google search page, and a mailbox

What a sad joke. A dual core 2.4GHz machine with 2GB of RAM crawling to a halt basically doing nothing.

Modified by firehog