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Firefox 3.6.13 has a terrible memory leak

  • 3 replies
  • 136 have this problem
  • 21 views
  • Last reply by hansfn

plnelson
plnelson
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When I first start up Firefox it consumes < 100MB. After a few hours of browsing and other work it's over a gig. If I leave it up all day it's almost 2 gig - and my PC has only 2GB, which means everything starts paging like crazy. The only way to release it is to shut down all instances of the firefox.exe process. And when you do that it takes a long time because firefox has to release all that memory back to the system.

People are complaining about this all over the web and some people say "it's not firefox, it's the add-ons" but that's a cop-out because it's the firefox.exe process that's taking the memory. This means firefox provides the sandbox for the add-ons to run in so it can control their resource allocations.

When I first start up Firefox it consumes < 100MB. After a few hours of browsing and other work it's over a gig. If I leave it up all day it's almost 2 gig - and my PC has only 2GB, which means everything starts paging like crazy. The only way to release it is to shut down all instances of the firefox.exe process. And when you do that it takes a long time because firefox has to release all that memory back to the system. People are complaining about this all over the web and some people say "it's not firefox, it's the add-ons" but that's a cop-out because it's the firefox.exe process that's taking the memory. This means firefox provides the sandbox for the add-ons to run in so it can control their resource allocations.

All Replies (3)

hansfn
hansfn
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I have also noticed this memory leak. To be sure it wasn't my extensions, I launched Firefox with an profile with no extension. The memory leak was still very much present.

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Did you check that there weren't any extensions installed in the new profile?

Plugins also can cause issues like that, so you can check that as well.

hansfn
hansfn
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Yes, I double-checked.

I did some testing:

1) Launching Firefox - 36 MB 2) Opening some random sites in 3-4 tabs and moving around on the sites (for an hour) - 168 MB 3) Closing all tabs, just leaving one empty tab - down to 116 MB, but staying there.

This is on Windows XP.