Why Firefox frustrates me

[yendi]

11% CPU usage is bad enough, but that at least fluctuates and can go down. 2.5GB of virtual memory? Fuck no. And nearly 400MB of real memory? Motherfucking no.

I love a lot of what Firefox offers, but it leaks memory like nobody's business.

And yes, I don't doubt that Google Reader and GMail contribute, as do any sites that run Flash (I keep Java turned off, as no site needs to even think about running Java apps without my permission, thank you very much; otherwise, I think I'd be at 4GB of vm usage). But we live in a Web 2.0 world; if the browser can't keep up, that's a problem, no matter how fast it can render a page of html.

Comments

[fiddledragon]

have you gone into about:config to turn down memory settings at all?

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Youch. I have a similar problem under windows, but my memory usage almost never goes above 250Mb or so.

How long do you let it run without restarting it?

[crwilley.livejournal.com]

That's one of my pet peeves lately. At work (admittedly on an old version - Mozilla 1.7.2 - but the alternative is IE5, which won't even run LJ properly these days...), there's one particular message board where I can watch the memory usage climb, and climb, and climb, and climb; if I'm really actively reading, Firefox will crash after about 3 hours because it's eaten up all the virtual memory.

I'd blamed it on the site - which I'm sure contributes - but yeah, the browser needs to be able to keep up with the user's demands.

[luis-mw.livejournal.com]

I have noticed that the CPU usage is mostly affected by the presence of animated graphics, which is a real pain at most sites seem to be incapable of surviving without fancy moving GIFs

[litch.livejournal.com]

My firefox iterations rarely ever run up that much memory, it still uses more memory than I would like but not that high. Currently my memory usage is 170m and my vm size is 190m and that's pretty typical on most machines I use (though I have a lot fewer tabs open than I recall you tending towards (currently 10).

I regularly will leave firefox open with dozens of tabs for days at a time with out much problem.

There were some memory holes fixed in the most recent couple of builds, you are using 2.0.0.9 right?

[moop2000.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know what you mean. I use Safari on my macs, but at work on my Vista machine, Firefox will do the same thing! It will easily suck down a couple hundred meg of memory. Oh well.

[texmorgan.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you pointed this out, mine has climbed from 86MB to 100MB in just the past 10 minutes or so. I think it might be time for me to switch browsers possibly to Opera or one of the others that Linux comes with that is more efficient.

[digriz.livejournal.com]

Just don't try to report it to the Firefox developers. Apparently, their standard response is either "That's never happened to us; you must have something setup wrong" or "Oh, that's because *insert bogus techie-sounding answer*, and it's not really a bug, it's supposed to do that". (I don't doubt that certain extensions, or certain combinations of extensions, make the problem worse, but I've had enough issues with a plain-jane install to convince me the browser is fundamentally broken somewhere.)

Oddly enough, despite their protests that nothing is wrong, Firefox 3 is supposed to have a "built-in memory usage monitor and manager"...

[rowancat.livejournal.com]

How many tabs do you keep open?
Mine reads 65Meg Mem Usage.
(doesn't say real or virtual)

[lovingboth]

OK, it's a Windows version 2.0.0.9, but I have about 500 tabs open (yeah, yeah) and it's only using 1.1G of virtual memory. No Flash, but GMail. AdBlock plus is getting rid of animated (and other) ads.