Firefox the memory eater

Pengwuino

My LORDY LORD, I'm running firefox right now with Gmail up, facebook, and a random website up. On facebook im playing one of the stupid flash 10 games. I go to check my task manager and firefox.exe is taking up 600MB OF MEMORY!!! Seriously? I even check out process explorer and yes, 600MB.

Have all the idiotic programmers in the world seen that memory prices have gone down substantially over the last few years and decided that they must make sure their programs take up as much memory as humanly possible?!?!? This is unbelievable! I have actual PC games that take up less memory while in use!!!! IMA BOUT TO SLAP A FOOL!!!!!

PENGWUINO EAT PROGRAMMERS!!!!

oh yah... uhm... I guess I don't really hvave a question... just venting...

Wait i have a question, where do I find where these programmers live?

phyzmatix

Random hey? That what you call 'em?

Maybe it's watching movie clips in HD that does it

Pengwuino

"No, baby, it's spyware, I didn't want to see that hotter younger version of you take her clothes off".

martharon

I got to agree firefox just eats the memory and causes lots of trouble. the current problem i am facing with firefox is it crashes very often.

Pattonias

What is your temporary stash set to? How many add-ons are installed?

JasonRox

I never used Firefox because even after the first time it was evident that it was no good.

People just started using them because of some trend and people want to be "different".

America founder of pseudo-individualism.

Anyways, are you still using it now?

Pengwuino

I have no idea, what is it and how can I control it? :)

I disabled all the add-ons that didnt seem crucial. I left stuff like AVG's part of it, java crap, flash crap, etc, but turned off all the nice little addons like download helpers and such. Anything that seemed necessary to actually run content I might normally run across was left on. I'm amazed that other people have this problem and i tisnt just some massive memory leak on my computer (read as : not amazed at all)

turbo

Try Google Chrome. Very low overhead, comes up fast, and unlike IE or FF, it doesn't keep booting me out of PF chat. It's pretty bare-bones, as browsers go.

Saladsamurai

I use it because I like it. To a non-computer geek, the choices are usually between the browsers we have heard of. This leaves IE or FF and to me, clearly FF is superior (at least in comparison too whatever edition of IE we have at work).


But now that you mention it, are lots of people using it? 'Cause if so, I need to switch to something less popular 'cause I'm like a non-conformist and stuff....

Pattonias

To check if it is a memory leak, you can restart the computer and then restart firefox. If firefox is not using the same amount of memory that it used doing the same things as before then it could possibly be a memory leak.

To check for spy-ware you can use spy-bot (http://www.safer-networking.org/index2.html) it is free and very reliable. Once you download it let it scan your system. It will tell you what, if any, spy-ware you have and allow you to remove it.

If none of this works, let me know and I can tell you how to check your internet cache and see if that is the problem.

mgb_phys

Firefox by default caches the last 8 pages for each tab bar you have open, and it pretty much never releases memory that it has grabbed for this. Apparently this isn't a bug it's a 'feature'.

The arguement is that most users aren't using the memory for anything else anyway, if your new home computer has 4Gb of Ram and you are only browsing the web - why not speed up the browsing by using as much ram as possible. when you start another program the Firefox cache will be swapped out to disk anyway.

If you use your computer for real work just restart firefox to clear it's memory, or there are a bunch of complex tweaks you can do see http://www.thinktechno.com/2007/10/0...ge-in-firefox/

Or you could just use Opera like all us cool kids ;-)

Santa1

Opera for windows and firefox for linux. :)

FredGarvin

I think Firefox is great. Granted it is a memory hog, but then again, I am not of the ADD generation that has to have 15 tabs going with my 3D shooter game, i-tunes and movie player all going at the same time. Also, I can count the number of times FF has crashed on me on one hand and those were due to pages with heavy scripts written for IE. Once I restarted and opened them in an IE window in FF (a very cool add on by the way) there were no issues.

With all of the customizations and flexibility Firefox gives you, I'll take the memory suck up any day over using IE or the like. I still have to try Chrome or Opera though.

Chi Meson

What's this "crash" people talk about? do your computers fall over?

DaveC426913

Yeah. So was Netsc ... er ... Firefox when it first started. Until it realized that mere goodwill and warm fuzzies from its loyal following weren't going to keep it competitive....

Dembadon

I prefer Links.

Saladsamurai