[RESOLVED] Firefox taking a LOT of memory

[CVMichael]

I keep my computer on all the time, and Firefox is open most of the time also.

But today I went into task manager, and saw the memory usage at 2.1 GB, and I have 2GB RAM

Of course when I saw that I checked what program takes that much memory, and to my surprise it was Firefox. It was taking ~ 1.1GB of memory !

I closed it, and opened it again, and now it's 53 Megs. But it seems everything I do keeps adding up, even when I close pages (or tab) it goes down a little bit, but still higher than when I opened the page.

Is there a setting somewhere that tells it to cache everything in memory (or something like that) ?

I have Firefox version 3.0.5

[techgnome]

I've had that problem with Firefox since 2.something. Even when I'm not using it, I simply open it up and load the home page.... it jumps and keeps going. I've evn taken out a number of the plugins that I use... still no help. And it seems to have gotten worse with the latest update. It no longer starts up quickly, taking as much as two-three minutes to load. Ifind myselft opting for IE and Chrome more often.

-tg

[kfcSmitty]

Lifehacker posted a link to this and it apparently works.

http://internetducttape.com/2006/12/...-firefox-hack/

[JuggaloBrotha]

are you guys running winxp on a 450mhz comp? FF2 and 3 run fine on my systems (950mhz and higher all with xp)

[techgnome]

Xp - yes... at what speed.... no clue... the laptop is a couple years old (3 I think) and wasn't exactly top of the line... but that doesn't explain the memory usage.

-tg

[kfcSmitty]

are you guys running winxp on a 450mhz comp? FF2 and 3 run fine on my systems (950mhz and higher all with xp)

It is a widely known issue (and claimed as a feature by the developers) that Fx does this. It can be solved easily by closing it down and re-opening the entire program, but if left open for a long time, it will keep increasing in memory usage until either you crash or close it.

[CVMichael]

It is a widely known issue

Now it's widely known by me too

Thanks for the link kfcSmitty, it still remains to be seen if that actually solves the problem, but from the feedback on that thread, it seems to work.

So thanks again

PS. I have Windows XP, 2.8 GHz, Dual Code, 2GB RAM (this is the computer at work, at home I have a slightly better one )