328321 - Memory Management/Garbage Collection Must Be Improves

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Alex Andrews]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050919 Firefox/1.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050919 Firefox/1.0.7

I have been using Firefox for ~6 months and much prefer it to IE, but the one area that REALLY lets it down is its memory management/garbage collection.  I've noticed that after 2-3 days of fairly average use, the memory usage of Firefox is usually around the 200 MB mark - that's with ~6 windows open and maybe 2-3 tabs in each, none of which is particularly intensive.  I've even uninstalled Flash Player to try and reduce memory usage, but it doesn't seem to have had a huge effect, and even after shutting down all other windows but my home page (which is home made and VERY basic), the memory usage does not drop.  This therefore necessitates a complete shutdown of Firefox (with all the inconvenience associated with it), since it's not even possible to start a separate firefox.exe process.

I really like Firefox, but it really doesn't live up to its less resource-intensive claims.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use Firefox for a couple of days for general browsing without ever closing it down.
2. Periodically check the Mem Usage and VM Size details for the firefox.exe process in Windows Task Manager.  Keep using until they are showing figures in excess of 100 MB.
3. Close down all Firefox windows/tabs except one and notice that the memory usage figures in Task Manager have not changed significantly.

Comment 1

[Philip Puryear]

There's really not enough information here to constitute a viable bug. Strides are being made to reduce the number of memory leaks within the browser and to improve memory management in general, but a bug report that simply states that memory usage is bad doesn't do much in the way of describing a specific, correctable problem.

->INVALID