Memory leak ?

Guest · Post by **Guest** » January 27th, 2005, 1:30 am

I too have a problem with firefox eating up too much ram and not giving back. and it also stays in the memory, the firefox.exe process does, and keeps holding on to whatever amount of ram it had when i closed it. Right now I have 1 window with 2 tabs open and it's getting 134MB ram + 156MB VM

very unnaceptable

Guest · Post by **Guest** » January 27th, 2005, 1:31 am

"when I closed it" - when I close FireFox that is, firefox.exe remains in the taskbar process showed using all the ram as if FF was fully opened

schapel · Post by **schapel** » January 27th, 2005, 1:54 pm

The problem with the Firefox process showing up after you quit it is that Firefox for some reason didn't shut down properly. This isn't the same bug as the mysterious "memory leak" people are reporting, although what you describe is a bug, too. If you can give us steps to reliably reproduce the problem, we can write up a bug report. If not, there's not much anyone can do to fix the problem.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » January 27th, 2005, 3:46 pm

OKay, so I see some people say they have the slowdown, others say "it's not memory!" other say "what's the poitn of havign a bunch of memory if you're not gonna use it" and a few even acting like the problem doesn't exist because they don't see it.

I've been using Forefox since before it was firefox. I never had a problem with leaving it open overnight, over a weekend, whatever, on my work machine. I have no changed my web browsing habits either. I ususally have alot of tabs open and work in many tabs at once. I view regular websites, nothing special. occaisionally some flash. Pretty ordinary stuff.

Once I installed 1.0 I started seeing a problem where I'd come in in the morning to work and my machine would be thrashing like crazy when I tried to do anything. It would usualyl take a bit to recover but would never fully recover speed. Many times I had to kill the firefox process.

I finally did the fix to adjust that one to 16000 (i'm blanking on the name of it and don't have time to look it up right now, it was mentioned 2nd or third post in this thread)

Fact is, there is SOMETHING going on and at least for me it never appeared until 1.0 was installed. But the fix most peopel quickly tout has worked great for me, so whatever the problem is (RAM, VM, CPU, whatever) that fixes it so that should at least be a starting point to figure out what exactly it fixed.

just my two cents.

WinLin · Post by **WinLin** » January 27th, 2005, 4:08 pm

Anonymous wrote:I too have a problem with firefox eating up too much ram and not giving back. and it also stays in the memory, the firefox.exe process does, and keeps holding on to whatever amount of ram it had when i closed it. Right now I have 1 window with 2 tabs open and it's getting 134MB ram + 156MB VM

very unnaceptable

You're being silly, that's how much Windows is using not FF. Instead of the performance tab click on the processes tab and scroll down the list to "firefox.exe". And FF, just like any other program, can not "hold on" to ram after it's closed.

Mine currently shows 226megs in use by Windows, the firefox.exe process shows 28megs, and I am currently using 1.25 megs of my 16meg cache.

AnotherGuest. · Post by **AnotherGuest.** » January 27th, 2005, 4:33 pm

There are enough reports of problems that it is indeed being taken seriously. There is at least one known, <i>reproducible</i> memory bug that will be fixed, and fixing it may or may not solve many or most of the problems that some of you report.

At this point, continued argument about whether there is a problem does not seem to be adding any new or useful information.

You should also be aware that much or most of the information in the Task Manager is extremely misleading and poorly documented. It simply doesn't show what you think it does.

AzSum · Post by **AzSum** » January 28th, 2005, 12:56 am

WinLin i was precisely talking about Processes tab and not Performance.

Right now, 1 window with 3 tabs all HTML non-multimedia pages firefox.exe 134,212K Mem Usage and 170,660 K VM Size

Last night when I closed the browser and went to bed it didn't go away, it stayed in memory hoging ~140MB + ~170MB VM

The 16000 hack made it even worse, now my whole pc freezes for a moment while FF trys to load a page once the memory usage has gone over 100MB

Im on a AMD 2500+ with 512MB PC2700 and SATA drive

Guest · Post by **Guest** » January 28th, 2005, 4:55 am

AzSum, if you close FF and you still have 140+meg in memory then you have a Zombie/Ghost running. You will need to look through your 'Process' tab in TaskManager and KILL any and all running firefox.exe's.

Your memory will then let go, and you won't be running in the 100meg range.

I currently have 7 tabs open and its sitting at 39Meg. on an AMD Athlon 650Mhz 512mb system.

AnotherGuest · Post by **AnotherGuest** » January 28th, 2005, 7:16 am

AzSum,
Please see my previous post, and those of schapel and myself (AnotherGuest. with a period) on the same subject.

It is inappropriate to add 140 MB to 170 MB VM and assume that is the total memory usage. For a start, you are counting most of the memory twice. I can only add that if you can read the Task Manager Help documents and actually figure out what is being reported, you are a genius. Not only is the Help document self-contradictory and confusing, it is at the very least, highly misleading--as is the Task Manager itself.

gest · Post by **gest** » February 8th, 2005, 10:27 pm

with the browser mem cache minimised my FF normaly uses about 20 -50 megs of win2ks vm on a 128meg laptop - i think this is usual. It is a heavy app, heavier than IE at the moment.
Besides that I find the version I use ocassionally chokes on rare pages (probably buggy) scripts causing a quick crash, or slow death by memory leak.
I doubt the developers are interested in hearing too much about these occasions, since while informative bug reports are not hard to come by, people with the time and ability to scrutinise and refine source code are less abundant ;P

Guest · Post by **Guest** » February 8th, 2005, 10:41 pm

Hey guys,

I appreciate that hard work that's been put into improving this browser over the last few years and the valuable feedback on this forum but come on, simply ignoring this "memory leak" or whatever you want to call it and blaming it on the way task manager reports ram usage? Seems that using none-FF-related scapegoats to explain this irregularity seems extremely ignorant in my opinion.

I run XP with 1052mb of ram I've tried the browser.cache.memory.capacity suggestion but still get an average of over 250mb (and more on many occassions) of reported RAM usage with 2 tabs open after a few hours of usage. I first started noticing this problem because my computer WAS running sluggish with FF open so I don't think anyone can hide behind the excuse... "task manager reports those ram usage statistics wrong and it won't affect performance of other programs if minimized because it re-allocates RAM".

"Advanced Nonlinear Access Lock Retentive" or not, I know when something is causing my computer to drag ass. I would love to see a developer/coder out there with the balls to admit that this IS a problem. It's just really frustrating when end-users like myself get insulted for "not knowing"

I'll be using Maxthon until this problem is fix. I hope all the feedback concerning this issue found throughout the internet will make a difference when FF 1.1 comes out. Again, thanks to everyone who has worked so hard to get this browser where it is now. There's a reason IE is losing market share and I'm hoping some fix for the aforementionned bug/problem will help them lose more.

Cheers,

A professional browser user

Guest · Post by **Guest** » February 8th, 2005, 11:10 pm

I think the aforementioned bug/problem has been admitted many times. It's real 'cause is a billion lines of code though though. Finding every single memory leak is pretty tough. I don't even bother to read all these threads, but geesh, one look at bugzilla forces you to admit that FF has a lot of work left to do on it. I mean, image titles don't even wrap text yet. That's a bug too. There's a huge backlist of work to be done. Anyone who claims FF has no bugs is an idiot. It definately works more than well enough to use though. I'm surprised it's slowing down your system to unusable (or even noticable) speeds. You sure there isn't something else running that's hurting you? I run it at home on a 900MHz P3 with only 128mb of RAM along with TB, Winamp and sometimes a Paint program and don't notice that much slowdown.

schapel · Post by **schapel** » February 9th, 2005, 5:12 am

Anonymous wrote:I appreciate that hard work that's been put into improving this browser over the last few years and the valuable feedback on this forum but come on, simply ignoring this "memory leak" or whatever you want to call it and blaming it on the way task manager reports ram usage?

That's not what's happening. Please re-read my posts to understand what <i>is</i> happening and why the problem is not being fixed.

therube · Post by **therube** » February 12th, 2005, 1:11 pm

FWIW, at the moment Mozilla is using 208K Mem, 213K VM.

That is typical. It does not conern me at the least. It does not impact my system performance in any fashion. It is using what it is using & that is that. If it were using any less, or any more, I would never even notice if I were not to look.

fcgiii · Post by **fcgiii** » February 12th, 2005, 2:45 pm

Just to add to the compilation of information, FF is fine until I download a file. After which it starts to consume both CPU and free memory. Since I am downloading very small files (MIDI files, typically under 50K each) it seems likely that there is a leak somewhere.

Memory leak ?

Why Don't Other Programs Show False RAM Usage Stats in T.M.?

Re: Why Don't Other Programs Show False RAM Usage Stats in T