Re: browsers have become memory hogs
On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 01:25:53PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
> On Thu, April 10, 2008 12:45 pm, Ron Johnson wrote:
> > I don't see how a single process could use 95% of memory on a 32-bit
> > system.
>
> I can. FF2.x was just painful on my laptop. It only has 256Mb and what
> i used to be able to do just a few years ago (Firefox, Thunderbird and
> gaim ne pidgin all open until the machine rebooted) I can barely manage
> for an hour or two now. FF3 has helped but I'm finding that it and
> XFCE4 are the primary hogs of memory.
>
> After a fresh login I'll have about 40-50Mb used, 0 swap. After a few
> hours of FF2.x I'd be maxed on memory and pushing 2/3rds of my 256Mb of
> swap. Close FF and most of the memory and swap go away. FF3 doesn't
> get that high but it still pushes my machine into swap without much
> trouble. What really gets me is after 2-3 days logged in I'll exit
> TBird, FF3 and Pidgin and be right back where I was when I logged in.
> Just XFCE4 loaded. 70-80Mb used, another 30-50Mb in the swap. I log
> out of XFCE4, log back in, 40-50Mb used, 0 swap. :/
Yes, it seems that, at least on Etch, there's a memory leak in the GTK2
widget library common to both FF and XFCE (and others). The leak does
not happen with Konqueror.
Have you tried Konqueror; you don't need all of KDE.
Doug.
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