Micha Feigin wrote:
My experience is that initially firefox uses less memory then opera (around 25 MB). The memory seems to grow comparable to the amount of time its been open and the number of pages opened (even in the same window, not in parallel). I just opened several pages of the same news site one after the other in the same tab. While initially the memory usage was about 25-28MB now with a single tab open it uses 60MB. It seems that firefox just doesn't know how to clean up after itself. With opera, even if the memory requirements go up with a lot of pages open, they come back down when you close the windows.
I agree. Firefox just keeps using more and more memory and the only solution is to shut it down. I had posted earlier about Firefox and javavm bringing my system to a halt and needing to be closed down (freeing up several hundred MB of memory and swap) to bring any usability to the box. (The full Mozilla suite does NOT have this problem.)
Well, yesterday, my wife (who uses Firefox) complained that she could do nothing. Links didn't work. Tabs would not change. Nada.
I looked, and, indeed, Firefox was completely unresponsive. Everything else was still functioning reasonably, however. I ran top and the javavm was NOT running, but Firefox was shown as using 47% of my memory. I have 256MB of RAM and 512MB of swap. Of that, 2MB of RAM was free (that is not a problem, in itself) and only about 11MB of swap was free. The combination is a killer! I killed Firefox, which freed up enough memory and swap that I could do a swapoff -a. I then did a swapon -a and looked at the output of free. I had about 30MB of RAM free and ALL of my swap. That means that killing Firefox (with NO other changes made in between) freed up about 530 MB of memory and swap! I just recently increased my swap from 256 MB to 512 MB thinking that would help, but all it does is give Firefox more memory to gobble up.
Something is rotten in the State of Firefox! -- Marc Shapiro