Firefox keeps getting better, doesn't it?

[Shelley]

Not even close. 310 on mine.

Firefox 3 series for me was using between 5oo - 600 after a few minutes. Since I got my new system which had firefox 4 installed it hasn't peaked above 150 which is very acceptable in my books. Quite liking the new version too.

 

[yavuz]

Firefox 3 series for me was using between 5oo - 600 after a few minutes. Since I got my new system which had firefox 4 installed it hasn't peaked above 150 which is very acceptable in my books. Quite liking the new version too.

My add-ons are causing the high load. They weren't when I was 3.6. Extremely annoying since every each of them are very important to me.

 

[Erik]

I'm pretty sure both Chrome and Firefox scale to the amount of memory available on your system. I currently have only two tabs open in just-opened Chrome and it's using about 260MB. I have 12GB of RAM on this system.

I don't see anything wrong with a browser using upwards of 500MB of RAM if you've got 6GB of available memory that's not being used at all.

 

[Shelley]

I'm pretty sure both Chrome and Firefox scale to the amount of memory available on your system. I currently have only two tabs open in just-opened Chrome and it's using about 260MB. I have 12GB of RAM on this system.

I don't see anything wrong with a browser using upwards of 500MB of RAM if you've got 6GB of available memory that's not being used at all.

I had 1 gig of ram total. You can start to see why I had a problem with it.

 

[yavuz]

I'm pretty sure both Chrome and Firefox scale to the amount of memory available on your system. I currently have only two tabs open in just-opened Chrome and it's using about 260MB. I have 12GB of RAM on this system.

I don't see anything wrong with a browser using upwards of 500MB of RAM if you've got 6GB of available memory that's not being used at all.

With 2 GB of ram 500 - 600 MB is very much

 

[Forsaken]

I'm pretty sure both Chrome and Firefox scale to the amount of memory available on your system. I currently have only two tabs open in just-opened Chrome and it's using about 260MB. I have 12GB of RAM on this system.

I don't see anything wrong with a browser using upwards of 500MB of RAM if you've got 6GB of available memory that's not being used at all.

Firefox doesn't scale, unless they've changed that recently (And people still complain over large leaks in memory, and higher CPU/RAM usage).

Chrome also doesn't, but I could be wrong, as I rarely use it.

The only browser I know that does scale to your system is Opera, and with about 40 tabs open, I only have a gig of ram in use, and most of those are HD videos that are ready to stream. Browser has been open for over a week now .

 

[mrGTB]

I had 1 gig of ram total. You can start to see why I had a problem with it.

I think PC memory does come into play that you have installed. I have 8 gig installed here, all my banks are maxed-out to the full. And it's expensive "Corsair Memory" I use.

Firefox causes no memory issues at all for me.

 

[Erik]

Firefox doesn't scale, unless they've changed that recently (And people still complain over large leaks in memory, and higher CPU/RAM usage).

Chrome also doesn't, but I could be wrong, as I rarely use it.

The only browser I know that does scale to your system is Opera, and with about 40 tabs open, I only have a gig of ram in use, and most of those are HD videos that are ready to stream. Browser has been open for over a week now .

Perhaps it scales on the OS side, then? I.E. some of what would normally be stored in RAM is written to the page file, which isn't counted in the physical memory totals? All I know is that when I got my new system, Firefox was regularly using 700 or 800MB, where it was using only 200 or 300MB before, and I had much more physical memory on that system (same version of Firefox).

 

[EQnoble]

This I am reading now over my morning brew,
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Infallible_memory_allocation
don't know how related it is though..

 

[SilverCircle]

Firefox doesn't scale, unless they've changed that recently (And people still complain over large leaks in memory, and higher CPU/RAM usage).

Chrome also doesn't, but I could be wrong, as I rarely use it.

The big advantage of Chrome regarding memory usage is its isolated process model. When you close a tab (or a group of tabs for the same site), the entire process dies and when a process dies, the operating system will automatically reclaim all memory that was occupied by this process. With such a model, memory leaks caused by bugs will have a much less significant impact on the overall memory usage. Memory leaks can only happen for the master process (which never dies unless you close the browser) and shared memory areas.

In Firefox, any memory leak caused by "forgetting" to free acquired memory will persist for the lifetime of the process.

Firefox will move to a isolated process model in the future. Work on this has been started a while ago and made good progress during the development of FF4, but it's not ready yet.

Firefox 4 was a big step with 3 major focuses:

1) UI overhaul
2) JavaScript and rendering performance
3) Web standards like HTML 5, CSS3, WebGL

For the development of Firefox 5, the developers already announced that one focus will be the optimization of resource usage.

P.S. The major source of memory leaks in Firefox is not the browser itself, but extensions. Addons like AdBlock plus or Firebug will significantly contribute to the overall memory leakage.

I'm not using such extensions and I see normal memory usage. See screenshot - about 260MB with about 10 tabs open, after the browser has been running for quite some time (accumulated 37 minutes of CPU usage - quite a lot on a fast Core i7 processor as it hasn't been shut down for about 2 days).

 

[Kim]

Firefox is using enormous amount of ram (500-700 Mb) is anyone experiencing this problem?

Yes, mine has become almost unusable, and will get to the stage it is taking up 80-90% of resources, causing my machine to freeze, very frustrating! I have Windows Vista SP 1 - just upgrading to SP2 to see if that is the issue, I notice there was a new FF 3.6. something overnight, so I will see if that makes any difference.

Not exactly sure when this started happening, but it is getting to the point I will have to stop using it, which will be hard as I love it, and use Firebug all the time!

 

[yavuz]

Yes, mine has become almost unusable, and will get to the stage it is taking up 80-90% of resources, causing my machine to freeze, very frustrating! I have Windows Vista SP 1 - just upgrading to SP2 to see if that is the issue, I notice there was a new FF 3.6. something overnight, so I will see if that makes any difference.

Not exactly sure when this started happening, but it is getting to the point I will have to stop using it, which will be hard as I love it, and use Firebug all the time!

I have to return to the previous version since this has become extremely annoying. My laptop couldn't take more

 

[SilverCircle]

Yes, mine has become almost unusable, and will get to the stage it is taking up 80-90% of resources, causing my machine to freeze, very frustrating! I have Windows Vista SP 1 - just upgrading to SP2 to see if that is the issue, I notice there was a new FF 3.6. something overnight, so I will see if that makes any difference.

Not exactly sure when this started happening, but it is getting to the point I will have to stop using it, which will be hard as I love it, and use Firebug all the time!

Try to disable the firebug extension and see if the problem persists. I too like firebug but it does contribute to resource leaks even when you don't use it (it's enough to have the extension enabled to cause the problems).

Personally, I've abandoned firebug and use Chrome for inspection tasks. Comes with about the same features minus the problems.

 

[Paul B]

Firebug Lite in Chrome is a very poor second to Firebug in FF.

That's the only reason I still have FF installed.

 

[Shelley]

Yes, mine has become almost unusable, and will get to the stage it is taking up 80-90% of resources, causing my machine to freeze, very frustrating! I have Windows Vista SP 1 - just upgrading to SP2 to see if that is the issue, I notice there was a new FF 3.6. something overnight, so I will see if that makes any difference.

Not exactly sure when this started happening, but it is getting to the point I will have to stop using it, which will be hard as I love it, and use Firebug all the time!

Mine has seem to stop since I upgraded to 4.0 (using the firebug ext). But then I'm now using a new system with 8 gig of ram though looking further as stated before it's peaking at 150 where on my 1 gig system using 3.6 it was jumping to 500-600 in a matter of a few minutes. I was almost at the point in giving up on firefox, everything seems to be flowing nicely atm *fingers crossed*

 

[Digital Doctor]

FF4 is very fast.

 

[EQnoble]

hmm I just noticed this...I am running ff4 with 10 addons/extensions and I sit comfortably at 160,000k with 9 tabs open including the addon manager. I wonder if it has to do with conflicting processes at all. Based on peoples experience from this thread I would think my memory usage would be a bit higher than that. Can anyone weigh in on this?

Mine has seem to stop since I upgraded to 4.0 (using the firebug ext). But then I'm now using a new system with 8 gig of ram though looking further as stated before it's peaking at 150 where on my 1 gig system using 3.6 it was jumping to 500-600 in a matter of a few minutes. I was almost at the point in giving up on firefox, everything seems to be flowing nicely atm *fingers crossed*

OHH so you got that new computer you had mentioned before?...do tell.. Have you posted it in the show us your rig thread? I wanna see

 

[yavuz]

Back to 3.6 again... The Ram usage was unbearable. I'll using chrome when I just surf the internet.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Back to 3.6 again... The Ram usage was unbearable. I'll using chrome when I just surf the internet.

RAM usage in 3.6 isn't that great either !

 

[yavuz]

RAM usage in 3.6 isn't that great either !

Well in my experience having the same number of extensions and opened tabs I have 122 MB of ram usage while with firefox 4 400-600 MB. Compared you get the picture.