Firefox memory usage

*Randall* · 01-27-2006, 08:21 PM

This Mozillazine article, Reducing Memory Usage (Firefox), is giving me some ideas. As many here will know, memory consumption has been my biggest complaint about Mozilla and its progeny. First on Windows, then on the Mac -- which means I can't blame everything on the OS's memory management.

People who shut the browser down every day probably don't run into these problems, but I can have a dozen web pages open for days at a time. It all starts adding up after a while.

One of the first things I looked at was browser.cache.memory.capacity. It's supposed to cache about 22MB of data in memory on a 512MB system. But when I typed about:cache?device=memory into the address bar, I got this:

Quote:

Number of entries: 1503
Maximum storage size: 22528 KiB
Storage in use: 140472 KiB
Inactive storage: 0 KiB

If the max storage is 22MB, then why is it using 140MB at the moment?

As I understand it, the memory cache is supposed to supplement the disk cache (76,800KB max, 76,769KB in use), not cache images from a site I visited a week ago. Why is it keeping 2MB jpegs in memory and 2K gifs on disk?

Good grief. No wonder Firefox is using 257MB of RAM (and another 1.4GB of virtual memory) right now.

So first I'm going to turn the memory cache off altogether (browser.cache.memory.enable) and see if that makes a difference. Reclaiming 140MB would be a nice start. There may be a cost in performance -- but performance ain't so great as it is.

I'll update this thread as I learn what works and what doesn't, in case it proves useful to someone. Maybe I'm not the only one who shuts the browser down once a month.

Randall

*dank* · 01-27-2006, 08:39 PM

The major difference for me was installing the Flash blocker plugin. That was 99.99% of my resource issues right there.

Dan

**Melissa** · 01-28-2006, 01:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Randall

memory consumption has been my biggest complaint about Mozilla and its progeny.

Mine too. Well, that and with Firefox when one window has to close due to an error, it takes the whole shooting match down with it (not just that window). I really wish each window would run as a separate process. I have been using that SessionSaver extension that the article mentions though and, most of the time, it works pretty well.

I've also noticed issues with the later versions of Adobe Reader, and have gone back to using 5 because of it. Blah. Maybe I'll try upgrading to the latest like they say...or maybe not.

I'm also a user like you, Randall, in that I always have multiple windows/tabs open (understatement) and put off restarting Firefox just as long as I can (sometimes to the point of where it just decides to it for me...

).

I've suspected a memory leak...it just doesn't seem like Firefox releases the memory properly at times...and I see the article specifically addresses this as well, so will have to look closer at it.

I've pretty much learned to accept its "shortcomings" up til now as the alternatives just won't cut it, and it just doesn't seem like it's any "one" thing doing it...making it really hard to nail. (Who knows...maybe the problem is my expectations...lol)

Anyway, thanks for the article and I'll be watching to see what helps you as well.

*dank* · 01-28-2006, 02:09 AM

Quote:

I've also noticed issues with the later versions of Adobe Reader, and have gone back to using 5 because of it. Blah. Maybe I'll try upgrading to the latest like they say...or maybe not.

The latest is by far the worst one yet. Previous versions ran pretty smoothly for me in Mozilla and Firefox, but 7.0 is insanely bad. I try to avoid PDFs now. Edit: I see there is a 7.0.5 now, but I'm not brave enough to try it.

Quote:

I've suspected a memory leak...it just doesn't seem like Firefox releases the memory properly at times...

That's what I was seeing, as well, but it was almost entirely due to Flash. I had pages taking up several hundred MB of memory that wouldn't release due to the Flash content.

Dan

*Randall* · 01-28-2006, 02:15 AM

Quote:

The major difference for me was installing the Flash blocker plugin. That was 99.99% of my resource issues right there.

Yes, I have that as well -- it's practically a necessity on my Mac, because a site with one or two Flash ads can push my CPU use to 100%.

Anyway, follow-up on the cache question: Disabling the cache seemed to have a positive effect on memory use, but I didn't spend enough time with it to know for sure. That's because Pandora stopped working.

Back to the drawing board...

Right now the cache is only 7MB, down from 11MB when I started writing this post -- but it's supposed to be 4MB according to the limit I set with browser.cache.memory.capacity, as suggested in that article. I'll be keeping an eye on it.

Meanwhile, something besides the cache is eating RAM, because I'm maxed out again. Maybe it's Pandora, which started working again when I re-enabled the cache. The fact that it's a Flash app should give Dan a chuckle.

Randall

*Randall* · 01-28-2006, 02:35 AM

Yeah, it was Pandora. Shutting it down freed almost 200MB.

Maybe I'll plug my headphones into the Dell and run Pandora from there...

Randall

**Melissa** · 01-28-2006, 02:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dank

The latest is by far the worst one yet. Previous versions ran pretty smoothly for me in Mozilla and Firefox, but 7.0 is insanely bad. I try to avoid PDFs now. Edit: I see there is a 7.0.5 now, but I'm not brave enough to try it.

Oy, I think I'll hold off on this as well. I guess that old "if it's not broken" thing applies... (I've also gotten conditioned to avoid PDFs.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by dank

That's what I was seeing, as well, but it was almost entirely due to Flash. I had pages taking up several hundred MB of memory that wouldn't release due to the Flash content.

I scaled back on the extensions to only those I felt I really didn't want to live without...mainly because I wasn't sure if one was conflicting with another and causing some of the problems. Never been a major user of extensions anyway, but will give Flashblock another try. Thanks for the input.

**Melissa** · 01-28-2006, 02:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Randall

Yeah, it was Pandora. Shutting it down freed almost 200MB.

Yikes. Haven't been running Pandora tonight (since restarting Firefox earlier). Think I'll run it on my other machine (and add Flashblock to this one) and see what happens... I know it's not the entire cause of my problems (heh, where do we start), but am sure it doesn't help matters.

**Melissa** · 01-28-2006, 02:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Melissa

...add Flashblock to this one...

The only trouble is that means I gotta restart it *again*...lol (whine)

*dank* · 01-28-2006, 02:56 AM

Hey, I put off installing Flash for several months because I hated the thought of closing the browser. But once I determined (through help here) that Flash was the cause of most of the problems, I installed the blocker plugin right away... That's the only plugin I run currently. My previous Firefox installs were hit or miss with completing plugin installations, so I got into the habit of ignoring their availability.

Dan