[Discuss] firefox 4 is a memory hog

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert Krawitz)]

On Thu, 02 Jun 2011 08:54:04 -0400, Matthew Gillen wrote:
> On 06/01/2011 07:28 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>>> From: discuss-bounces at blu.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at blu.org] On Behalf
>>> Of Matthew Gillen
>>>
>>> I've noticed lately that when I unlock my gnome3 session after being
>>> gone for a while (several hours), it takes forever to get me back to a
>>> useable desktop.  I initially was blaming gnome-shell, but it appears
>>> the problem is actually firefox forcing the whole system into swap.
>>>
>>> Firefox was using 60% of memory.  Killing it and reloading the same set
>>> of tabs makes it use 6.3% of memory (as reported by 'top').  I don't
>>> think it's a particular web page that is going screwy, because it
>>> happens at work and at home, and my set of tabs are completely different
>>> (okay, fine, I use google.com in both environments...)
>>>
>>> Is anyone else seeing this kind of runaway memory usage?
>> 
>> 60% of what?  1G?  4G?  8G?
>> 
>> FF is a memory hog.  So is everything else.  Upgrade memory.  4G if all you
>> do is web browsing and email.  8G or more if you run a myriad office
>> applications and a VM inside it too.

4G for email and browsing seems frankly absurd.

> It doesn't really matter how much memory I have (4G) , my point is that
> the memory usage was a factor of *10* higher than it should have been,
> and that the bloat happened while I wasn't even interacting with it.
> Adding more memory to deal with a process that just eats all available
> memory (which is what appears to be happening; my large swap partition
> was fully in use before I kill FF) doesn't solve anything.
>
> With the 3.x series I used to leave a firefox session up for a month at
> a time.  Now it appears I have to restart it every day.  I'm
> uncomfortable with the slide towards Window-95-style "oh, just reboot
> every day"...

Interesting.  I have the same problem with 3.6, as I did with at least
3.5 previously (I don't remember 3.0).  This is with only 20-30 tabs
open.  I find I have to restart FF at least daily; once it grows to 2
GB, it gets very slow.  My laptop (Inspiron 9400) only has 3.3 GB of
usable memory, but I'd be hard pressed to find one now with a WUXGA
display and an ATI/AMD chipset (last time I tried, the open source
nVidia drivers weren't very good even for ordinary 2D stuff and I
flatly refuse to run the proprietary ones).  1920x1080 is not a
substitute for 1920x1200, although I'd prefer even higher resolution
if I could find it.

I figure it could be one or more of my extensions, but root causing it
by binary chop will be painfully tedious.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

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