One of the main issues that I’ve always had with Firefox is the extraordinarily large amounts of memory it eats up. If I’m running Firefox 2 it normally only takes a few hours of heavy use to see the browser sky rocket to more than 750MB of memory usage, and it begins eating up 40% to 60% of my processor. The only cure is to restart Firefox, which can be a pain when I’m in the middle of something.
Mozilla has claimed before that the Firefox memory leaks are actually a caching feature, but no browser should be eating up that much memory. Firefox caches things such as pages you’ve recently visited, images, fonts, and more. All of this so that the user sees better performance, but at the expense of your computer’s memory.
Stuart Parmenter has created an extension called RAMBack that will clear most of the major caches in Firefox, thereby freeing up some of your precious memory. The extension is only for pre-release versions of Firefox 3, but it does seem to work rather well. I’ve been able to recover upwards of 10MB of memory from Firefox 3, which isn’t all that bad considering it was using 105MB at the time. That’s almost a 10% reduction.
To use the extension you’ll find a Clear Caches option in the Tools menu, or a button is available to be added to one of the toolbars.
I’ve been trying to use the Firefox 3 nightly builds more and more to test out the memory usage, and I have to say that it is getting better. From what I’ve read Mozilla is going to be focusing heavily on the performance of Firefox 3 soon, and their hope is to have it perform better than all of the previous versions. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
I see why this could be quite useful for some users, but i just don´t know how there could be 750 mb of ram in use. how many tabs have to be open to have firefox becoming such a memory drain?
I use different profiles to make sure that i have only those extensions installed that i need. i.e. i have a profile for videos (kind of a web video player), a research and bibliography profile, the default profile , and some more. If for example there are 3 profiles running and let´s say 10-15 tabs opened in each profile, that adds up to 300-350 mb.
It´s still a lot of ram, but i´m using it for many different purposes at the same time so i don´t care.
I have over 35 extensions installed and I rarely ever see my Firefox go above 200mb. Then again, I don’t keep the same browser session open for more than a day at time. If I ever see it go up to high or if it ever starts being sluggish, I just hit the restart browser button that’s included in the Mr Tech Local Install extension and it restarts the browser with all previous sessions and tabs.
Use the extension PrefBar to do this and much more.
It’s not a matter of how many tabs have to be open. If the number of tabs was proportional to the amount of memory used there would be no problem. A memory leak means that a tab was closed, but the memory it was using was not given back to the operating system. If you lose, lets say, 3MB per tab you open/close then the result would be a 30MB increase in memory usage even with those tabs open. When I’ve hit 750MB of memory usage it’s often with no tabs open, but after heavy usage throughout the day.
I restart my browser about once a day as well, and I only have about 6 extensions installed. The total amount of memory that Firefox is capable of using depends on the amount of RAM in your system, and in my case there is 2GB. So it likes to eat up a lot.
Not quite the same thing. From what I gather this is using Firefox 3-specific functionality to wipe clean the memory that is being used for the cache. It’s not the same as just erasing your browser’s cache.
I have the same problem, Firefox takes all the the physical and virtual memory for himself and the harddisk starts yelling
so I am now switching to Opera portable version.
If you have terrible memory issues then Opera is definitely a solution I highly recommend. You may find some site compatibility issues, but overall it works pretty well.
CacheViewer ([addons.mozilla.org]) is the best
I have used that add-on before, but I hardly find myself digging through my browser’s cache looking for files.