Firefox is a Memory Hog?

June 10th, 2007

I’ve noticed that the longer I leave Firefox running on my Mac, the more memory it seems to take up even if I’m not using it and the pages I’m viewing are static (no AJAX or other updating elements). I decided to do a little test and see how much memory it was taking up with three pages open that I’ve had open for hours, then restart with the “When Firefox starts: Show my windows and tabs from last time” option selected in the preferences (which will basically reload all the tabs that were open when I restart the browser). The results are below:

Before: Firefox Memory Usage Before Restart

After:
Firefox Memory Usage After Restart

The restart basically reduced “real memory” usage by 306.5 MB and “virtual memory” by 1.2 GB!

Poking around the Web, there are a lot of reports of memory leaks in Firefox but what causes them and if they even exist is contested. I’ve decided to follow some advice at simplehelp.net and set Firefox’s browser.cache.memory.capacity setting to 18432. I’ll let you all know what happens :).

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 11:59 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Firefox is a Memory Hog?”

Post status Says:
March 24th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Will like to know if the solution helped your cause
Jon Says:
March 24th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Yes, it greatly reduced the amount of memory Firefox collects while staying open for long periods of time. From what I hear, Firefox 3 will have great improvements in resource allocation so hopefully this will just be a temporary fix.
Track Firefox 3 Crashes | Jontopia Says:
July 8th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
[...] found Firefox 3 to be much more stable and less memory intensive than previous versions. However, if you’d like see how many times Firefox 3 has crashed [...]

Jontopia