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Version 74.0 (64 bit) on Windows 7 is taking all physical memory

  • 4 replies
  • 4 have this problem
  • 6 views
  • Last reply by RASelkirk

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The sites on which this is occurring include those with multiple, frequently refreshing ads and other content: BBC News, Discover Magazine blogs, Boston Globe newspaper. Over a fairly short time, e.g., 20 minutes or so, physical memory usage as reported by Task Manager climbs to over 95%. Closing the tab for the offending web site almost always immediately drops memory usage to under 40%. If that fails, closing and then reopening Firefox fixes the problem. Please note that this did not occur with the previously installed version. I have Firefox set to automatically update.

The sites on which this is occurring include those with multiple, frequently refreshing ads and other content: BBC News, Discover Magazine blogs, Boston Globe newspaper. Over a fairly short time, e.g., 20 minutes or so, physical memory usage as reported by Task Manager climbs to over 95%. Closing the tab for the offending web site almost always immediately drops memory usage to under 40%. If that fails, closing and then reopening Firefox fixes the problem. Please note that this did not occur with the previously installed version. I have Firefox set to automatically update.

All Replies (4)

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This is a known bug we are working on resolving. it is being discussed here https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1608725

Sorry for the inconvenience at the moment.

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Firefox is taking almost 600K of physical memory.

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You tell me it's a known bug, but require some special permission to view information about it! Sorry I don't have an account with "appropriate permissions"! I'll tell you one thing: if you don't fix it soon, I'll be using a different browser.

Almost every time I go away from my system for an hour or so, when I come back, Firefox has consumed so much memory that my memory is about 95% full (from initially being 65% or less full). My system is so unresponsive that it sometimes takes up to a minute just to run the Task Manager to kill the offending Firefox process. It's always one process among eleven or so other Firefox processes (I keep quite a few windows and tabs open). Killing that process often mostly solves the memory problem for several hours. It does, however, create several other problems. First, it nearly always causes one or more tabs to crash. They can usually be restarted by clicking the Restart Tab(s) button on the page that replaces a crashed tab. Sometimes, though, one of the Firefox windows quits responding entirely, or more often, a Twitter page can no longer update. In those cases, I have to restart Firefox.

What seems odd is that the problem appears to happen more when my system is idle than when I'm using it, and actively browsing. Though I suppose that could just be my imagination. What I do know is that the excess memory consumption occurs even if all the Firefox windows are minimized. Why does a minimized window need to allocate great quantities of memory in a relatively short time?

This bug wouldn't be a big problem if it didn't happen so often. I've had Firefox memory usage problems in the past, but never anything that occurred with the regularity of the current bug. It's been going on for quite a long time; there's been plenty of time to fix it.

Modified by _MJW_

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_MJW_, I'm in the same boat. FF v75.0 on Win7x64, Would be nice to see the "discussion", but my regular creds aren't good enough to view it. My laptop has 8 gigs of RAM and after an hour or so, mainly just sitting there doing nothing, FF is using 90% of that. Also, why does this version open 4 sub-systems, none of which are actually visible?

I'm about to revert to Chrome...

Russ