[Discuss] firefox 4 is a memory hog

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 06/02/2011 09:24 AM, Robert Krawitz wrote:
>> 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.

That was actually one of the things that should make this easier: only a
couple of my extensions are actually compatible with FF-4.  Good thought
though.  I'll disable everything except flashblock and see if that helps.

Matt