245746 - Firefox is very memory-hungry under all circumstances

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 263930

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Frits Heeb]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8

Firefox uses a lot of memory (both physical and virtual), much more than e.g.
IE. Maybe some optimization in this area would be welcome.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Firefox
2. Start Task Manager
3. Check memory usage

Actual Results:  
High memory usage

Expected Results:  
Use less memory

Comment 1

[Bernard Alleysson]

WFM Firefox Windows 20040604 0.8+/1.7
Please download a nightly build before reporting bugs, 1.6 is too old, thanks.
And unless you have particular steps to reproduce this along with precise memory
numbers (Firefox vs IE), this is INVALID.

Comment 2

[Song Ken Vern]

Attachment: Task Manager

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040707
Firefox/0.9.2
Windows 200 5.00.2195 Service Pack 4

View of my task Manager window. I am using Tabbrowser extensions with 5 tabs
open and 4 downloads going on. 
Memory usage keeps on increasing when I leave Firefox open for a long period of
time (3-5 days) without shutting it down.

Comment 3

[Song Ken Vern]

(In reply to comment #2)
IE open with 5 windows and the same url is only using 20MB of memory.

Comment 4

[imrambi]

This is not only windows. 

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040809 Firefox/0.9.3
Linux 2.6.7-gentoo-r9 


Running top in linux shows that firefox is currently taking up about 43% of my
memory. I have 384megs of ram with 512 megs of swap.

The memory usage will decrease when firefox closes. I have seen my swap drop
around more than 30% and my used physical ram drops more than 40%.

I usually have firefox open for a few weeks on end with an average of >10 tabs
constantly. More pages I visit, the more memory usage increases.

A good example is go to news.google.com and let the browser be open for a day on
that page and check the memory stats at the end of the day.

Comment 5

[Ray Reyes]

Memory usage is extreme when viewing graphics-heavy sites. Under WinXP Pro I've
watched my memory plunge from 743+ MB free to 4 MB free or less in just a few
minutes.  I've tried adjusting memory usage size, even tried turning memory
cache OFF completely.  No joy.  Running Cacheman XP to try and recover memory
doesn't do a damn thing ... Firefox is hanging on to everything.  And this is
with the latest nightly build! Absolutely (and tiresomely) reproducible. 

Comment 6

[Robin Monks]

Reporter, is this bug related to:
bug 261424
bug 256424
bug 263930 or
bug 265139

Comment 7

[Robin Monks]

I am duping to the very similar bug 263930.  

>> Memory usage is extreme when viewing graphics-heavy sites.
See bug bug 256424 for that.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 263930 ***