Reduce memory footprint please.(Popular Compliant from News)

[DieHard]

I've been reading slashdot and other news related to firefox. Through the months, I'm consistently seeing the same old complaints, memory hogging, requesting to reduce the memory footprint.

I hope the Firefox developers see this, if not someone pass the message to them please.

I use firefox a lot, and I'm not complaining, but reading the news, those comments from many users, memory complaint is always coming up. It will never end, until it's followed-up. Read it yourself the newest article, do a search on "memory":
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/10/11/2030231.shtml

I just want to voice it on the this forum.

[malliz]

Whatever

[andyJ234]

The problem is, firefox adjusts many aspects of its memory consumption habits based on the amount of memory the user's computer has, and most users don't know this. You can run firefox just fine with 256mb of ram, yet a user with 1GB of memory will notice firefox using up to 500mb at times.

I really don't agree with the developers decision to set the default this way, because people will just see large values in task manager and complain. I would agree that overall, it just seems a bit unnecessary to have firefox use that much memory, no matter how much free memory your system has.


edit: took out the stuff that I had no idea what I was talking about.

[schapel]

It will never end, until it's followed-up.

It will never end, no matter what. Even if only 100 Firefox users see any sort of memory problem, and all the problems are caused by buggy plug-ins or extensions, people are going to complain that Firefox is a memory hog. They're doing it now, even though <a href="http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=468525">I can demonstrate Firefox using much less memory than other browsers</a>.

Rather than discuss a vague, mysterious memory problem that no one can seem to reproduce, I think our time is better spent finding actual specific memory leaks. And we need to realize that even if Firefox never leaks memory, it has a reputation for being a memory hog that's never going to die.

[schapel]

...Therefore for each tab you have open, considering you've been browsing on each one through multiple pages, firefox will store 8 rendered pages in the "back" history. If you have 6 tabs open, this will amount to storing up to 6 + 6x8 pages at once (6 currently on the front, with 8 in the "back" history of each tab), which would equal a total of 54(!) pages being stored in memory...

There are several factual errors with your discussion above. The main one is that the bfcache is not per-tab.

[DieHard]

Even though I'm not complaining on my own experience. It is annoying to read news about firefox with couple of comments about consuming memory. And news on every version release of Firefox. Memory (leaking or hogging) is a primary complaint from users, it's a fact no doubt about it, users from slashdot, neowin, dailytech, and so on.

I do believe you guys are saying, but it's not getting out to the public.

I hope somone from Mozilla address this firefox memory topic popular on the internet.

[schapel]

I hope somone from Mozilla address this firefox memory topic popular on the internet.

What do you propose we do? No matter what, if <i>anyone</i> says that Firefox is using hundreds of megabytes of RAM, many others point and say, "See, Firefox really <i>is</i> a memory hog."

The only thing I can think of that we can do is to run <a href="http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=468525">the benchmark I created</a> and note the results we get. I've already done that, so others need to do it now. How about you?

[donkeyboy]

You have bucket loads of RAM for a reason. Unless you are trying to run loads of programmes at once, it shouldn't really be a problem.
Usually I have four programmes running - Firefox, Microsoft Word, Endnote, iTunes. It doesn't matter much to me how much resources Firefox uses, as long as the others are still able to do everything quickly enough.

[RobertJ]

I'm sitting here with FF 2.0rc2 on OS X 10.4.8 with 1G of RAM. FF has 5 tabs open with an animated Doppler weather image on one; I use 22 extensions and a custom theme. I also have Thunderbird, MSWord, MSExcel, AdobeReader, BBEdit and GraphicConverter running.

FF is taking between 20M - 80M of real memory and 120M - 300M of virtual memory. It's performance is great in terms of loading pages (usually a couple of seconds for sites that aren't clogged with traffic).

Don't see the issue.

[StormFX]

Anyone who takes anything from any media outlet at face value needs their head examined. Every report, review and story is biased. Every single one.

I've had no issues, personally.

[DieHard]

I don't too at a personal level. But, the issue is I see the "memory" topic discussed everytime by different users. I think it means something is wrong with Firefox.

Brand new article from Slashdot, do a word search on "memory":
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/10/14/0840236.shtml

[BenBasson]

If there were a real memory problem with Firefox (other than a bunch of random non-technical, unhelpful reports), then I suspect it'd be reproducible by developers and would be fixed. Aside from memory leaks that are clearly identifiable (and some logging) that has already been sorted out, I doubt you'll see much progress.

[schapel]

I don't too at a personal level. But, the issue is I see the "memory" topic discussed everytime by different users. I think it means something is wrong with Firefox.

If you could be specific about what the problem is, it could be fixed. There's no point in a vague comment like "Firefox should use less memory" or "Firefox should have fewer security vulnerabilities" or "Firefox should crash less". Is there a paricular memory leak bothering you? If so, file a bug report. If not, there's really nothing to discuss.

[DieHard]

Another news article from slashdot (brand new), same general complaint about memory, different users:
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/10/17/1215241.shtml

After reading this list, I must say that there are more than a few features I don't care about. That's not to say other people don't need them, it's just that I'm not going to benefit from any of these yet. In fact, the only reason I'll upgrade is because it's so easy.

That said, I wish they would take care of these problems [mozilla.org] at some point. I know on the current Firefox, you can take measures [freerepublic.com] to restrict its size but I think it starts to thrash when I go to a largely intensive Flash site. I would rather it not steadily accrue memory as I use it through the day and visit sites that use Flash extensively. I know that Flash is a plug-in and this is one of the leading causes of memory problems in Firefox [mozillazine.org]. But it's the only extension/plug-in I use and it's so I can see average websites, I don't do anything special or extraordinary with it. You'll probably be able to convince me that this is Flash's fault yet I don't quite see the same effects in IE. Conspiracy? Well, I'm all ears and happy if it is.

Maybe it's the fact that I have between 5 and 10 tabs open at a time. Although I'm good at closing them, sometimes the memory doesn't seem to be freed up. Maybe that's not Firefox's fault and it's these shady sites (like Slashdot) that allocate resources that can't be freed? Maybe this is an unavoidable problem and IE 7 will experience the same problems--I'm not sure but we'll see I guess. What should worry Firefox proliferation advocates is that I'm willing to try out IE 7 when Windows forces it on my machine just to see if I can use it all day without having it blow up a couple times due to memory leaks.

So this features list has some intriguing points but the one that would make me squeal like a giddy school girl would be:

* Large Amount of Memory Issues Fixed.

It's not a feature but it means the world to me.

So, in the end, I hope that the development efforts of Firefox 2 are spent implementing better memory management and control instead of introducing more features. More features are probably a lot more fun to develop and I know I get this for free so I'm not in any position to bitch. But if you want to make me an I'm-going-marry-Firefox fanboy, fix the memory leaks that plague the occasional user--I'm not saying all of them, just the ones that large percentages of your users probably experience.

Does anyone else experience memory issues with Firefox? Does anybody know if development efforts for Firefox 2 have included memory management? I can't seem to find any record of that online.

I don't know what specifics about the memory problem, but here is something I found.

Again, my only problem is that it's annoying to see topics about "memory" again and again all over the internet. I want to bring it up because this is something that needs to be resolved. I wish Mozilla would inform the users about Firefox's memory is not at fault.

[malliz]

Stop bloody trolling Reporting you for same