Stop Firefox munching memory - HOW!?!

Firefox Development
#1

Dear Anyone.

So I start off with 12gigs RAM. Open Firefox. Use it a few hours (I dunno, some serious stuff like learning programming, some fun stuff like stoopid games!) Then I hear massive hard-drive activity, look in Resources and I’m down to 700K of RAM. Closedown Firefox, reopen it, restore all tabs/pages (so same games, same E_mail, same everything) and I got 8GIGS of RAM free, doing the same things.

So it’s Firefox munching memory, not clearing the memory it’s munched, going onto the next cleared chunk till there’s nothing left. And it’s ALWAYS been like this. Every version does this.

I love Firefox - apart from this bug that’s been there from day 1. Please - anyone know how to stop it memory-munching? Many times I’ve had other software crash because Firefox has munched all the memory. I don’t wanna stop using it - but there’s gotta be a way around this by now, no?

Yours hopefully

Chris.

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#2

The first thing to try is Troubleshooting Mode. If Firefox behaves better in Troubleshooting Mode then the problem is likely with an add-on you are using.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/diagnose-firefox-issues-using-troubleshoot-mode

Please come back an tell us what you learn.

#3

I have the same problem. I got no response on Bugzilla.

But here it is: Even if I reload 300 tabs on startup, why is it taking up such an excess of memory where the content is not even loaded from the network?

And the majority of my add-ons are ad blockers and the like…

#4

Dear Tripleo.

Well… Firefox has has this bug - and I promise it’s a bug even though I bet I get yelled at - from day 1. Think of it like this. Your computer’s a big house, with loads of rooms. Each room is a chunk of memory. Firefox never tidies a room after it uses it, it just leaves it in such a mess it can’t use it any more and it goes onto the next room. So it ends up not so much ‘using’ swathes of memory, as leaving large chunks of memory in such disarray that it can’t use them - and neither can anything else.

So it’s not rogue plug-ins, or tons of tabs that are ever the problem. And you can prove this. If you bring up Task Manager, then terminate Firefox - along with the mentioned 300 - or whatever(!) - tabs by using Task Manager, you’ll see the amount of spare memory leap up. If you then restart Firefox, and see the message ‘Sorry, we were unable to reload all your tabs’ (or similar, you know the message, yup, that one!) and click on the ‘Restore Session’ button, it won’t use anywhere NEAR as much memory as it was when you force-terminated it!

Why? Because it’s being neat. It’s not messed any rooms up yet. But after 4 mins of restarting/reusing tabs, looking at stuff, browsing, you’ll see your memory being munched like candy once more.

Firefox is a great browser - but it’s always had this memory-munching problem because it never tidies up after itself and nobody’s EVER cured it in all the years of its existence. There’s other browsers - Slimjet’s one - that are far better with memory but overall they’re not as good as Firefox. I wish the Firefox developers would cure this memory leak prob., it’s been around so long it’s stupid.

Yours respectfully

Chris. Who always uses Firefox, despite its memory munching!

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#5

Yes. This is exactly what I go through and it is so irritating!

#6

i guess this is the cache memory problem

#7

Yup, that’s the one! Why can’t they just fix it? None of the other browsers do it this bad and it’s Firefox’ only weakness. Just to show that -

My g/f’s computer’s at the end of the wi-fi food chain in her house - when everyone else is on their comps. she’s getting ‘can’t find web-page’, extra long loading times - unless she’s using Firefox. That’s the ONLY browser that works well on her laptop when everyone else is using their computers. So it’s an excellent browser, better than Chrome (which is the worst on her laptop by far!)

It’s just this cache memory prob. - she’s forever having to check how much memory’s left and force-close and restart Firefox! And the prob’s been there years!!

It’s such a shame - none of the other browsers are as bad as Firefox - but Firefox beats all the other browsers for working on laptops. So we just use it and keep an eye on memory in Task Manager. Just wish we didn’t have to!

Yours respectfully

Chris.

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#8

The one reason I am not using FireFox right here, even though I really really want to.