high memory usage from firefox

ulu

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Is this typical behavior for firefox?

opening firefox starts around 70,000k usage and is a mediocre speed. Netbook is in a bit over it's head anyway running windows 7 64bit home

the longer I'm online, the more firefox usage increases, even when I keep just 1 page open at a time. After a couple hours, just having the yahoo page open , it will be using 900,000k and continually hanging itself.
Deleting temp files/cookies/history etc from control panel takes about 5 minutes. Immediately after clearing if I try to clear again, takes another 5 minutes when it should already be empty.

There are 85 processes running,while I check email. This also seems wrong.
 

Stone Butterfly

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Is this typical behavior for firefox?

opening firefox starts around 70,000k usage and is a mediocre speed. Netbook is in a bit over it's head anyway running windows 7 64bit home

the longer I'm online, the more firefox usage increases, even when I keep just 1 page open at a time. After a couple hours, just having the yahoo page open , it will be using 900,000k and continually hanging itself.
Deleting temp files/cookies/history etc from control panel takes about 5 minutes. Immediately after clearing if I try to clear again, takes another 5 minutes when it should already be empty.

There are 85 processes running,while I check email. This also seems wrong.
How do you check all this so as to know?
 
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paul1149

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That seems exorbitant and unacceptable. If FF has not been reported as having a memory leak, I would suspect an add-on. The easiest way to check is to run in FF's safe mode and see if there's a difference. If so, run in full mode again, disabling half the extensions at a time in a process of elimination.

You can change font size in Chrome via advanced settings.
 
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NiobiumTragedy

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Both Chrome and FF have issues with memory leaking. Right now for me, FF is running about 625MB of RAM with 5 tabs open to various websites. Facebook seems to be the worst culprit when it comes to using memory in any browser. It has way too many scripts running at once.
 
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EphesiaNZ

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If your resources are limited you may wish to try a web browser called Midori, which is available for Windows users to try. It's a well featured but very lightweight browser, has inbuilt extensions such as adblocker etc...

Can't vouch for the Windows version of this as I've never used it on that OS but it maybe worth a try.

Linux users can get it from their distro's software repository but may find the previous version (0.4.x) of Midori so I would download it from the above link.
 
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EphesiaNZ

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While I was in the mood I did a non-scientific test for browser memory usage. The following browsers were tested,

Mozilla Firefox 23.0.1
Google Chrome 29.0.1547.65
Midori 0.5.4

All browsers installed on my machine (Debian Linux) and each one opened when machine was idle using 275MB of memory. Once browser was launched, I left each for a minute in order to settle machine resources then took a memory reading. For the record, each browser had an adblocker active and one tab open which pointed to Google's search page.

Here are the browser memory usage results,

Mozilla Firefox - 130MB
Google Chrome - 160MB
Midori - 75MB

Clear winner there!


 
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Sketcher

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That seems exorbitant and unacceptable. If FF has not been reported as having a memory leak, I would suspect an add-on. The easiest way to check is to run in FF's safe mode and see if there's a difference. If so, run in full mode again, disabling half the extensions at a time in a process of elimination.
Agreed, there's the base app and then there are the add-ons which are reputed to add memory usage. You'll also want to give this a read: Reducing memory usage - Firefox - MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

There are days when I see Firefox alone take up 1.5 GB of RAM after a shift of work and a hundred or so tabs (95-100% work-related ;)). Sometimes, I just exit out of Firefox when I get a good chance to.
 
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Sketcher

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Me, no. Tree Style Tab, DNS Flusher, Firebug/YSlow, Clear Cache Button, and some cookie manager I can't remember the name of off-hand. It mainly comes from having a ton of tabs open. Since tabs remain in memory until Firefox closes anyway, I just leave them up and economize on their use where I can securely do so.
 
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