Comparing Memory Usage of Firefox 2 vs 3

DaMan writes "ZDNet picks up on yesterday's Firefox 3 beta 1 review by comparing the memory usage of Firefox 2 against the latest beta. The results from one of the tests is quite interesting, after loading 12 pages and waiting 5 minutes, 2 used 103,180KB and 3 used 62,312KB. IE used 89,756KB.""

Yes, but...

How much does it use on Linux... err... does it run... damn!

Sorry, I'm new at this....

And Opera

is using 34mb (winXP)

Re:And Opera

I'm assuming you loaded the exact same 5 pages with the same ads that the ZDnet testers did?

Re:And Opera

plugins (dlls) generally run in-process

Re:And Opera

Is it just me or does it seem like 60MB or even 34MB is a LOT of memory for something that browses Web pages?

I mean, people used to make fun of GNU Emacs, saying things like it stands for eight megabytes and constantly swapping or eventually malloc()'s all computer storage. Emacs takes somewhere around 10MB or so on a RHEL4 box, and that thing is practically an operating system. It reads mail! Firefox doesn't even read mail, and it takes 60MB. Opera reads mail, but still 34MB seems just too big, too.

Maybe I'm just getting to be a cranky old man. Now you kids get offa my lawn!

Re:And Opera

IANAWBD (Web Browser Developer), but... there's just so much data for web pages now. You've got plugged-in interpreted flash code, graphics that need to be kept in RAW formats in memory because of speed, the full length and width of the page on an in-memory surface to pan through on a window.

Even then it still needs a dynamic layout for CSS and scripting on the fly. And even then some scripting is safe, some is not, so there are rules that the code has to implement like pop-up blockers, password managers, warnings on insecure pages, warnings on cross-site scripting, etc. All that and the browsers STILL need to be able to sensibly parse and display completely borked pages with invalid HTML.

Nevermind maintaining history, cache, cookies, referring pages, bookmarks.

Re:And Opera

Not raw like your camera raw, but raw uncompressed format. All those JPGs and GIFs and PNGs must be converted to raw or bitmap files to display them on the screen.

Re:And Opera

The "w3" web browser extension for Emacs can display images.

Re:And Opera

Yes, but it's equally inefficient for Firefox to have to swap this sort of thing in and out when the OS is under memory pressure.

What we really need is a mechanism for e.g. Firefox to use large amounts of memory to speed up page loading when there's plenty of memory, but to optimize for a small memory footprint when I've got ten zillion Gimp windows and Picasa open.

Why should Firefox behave in exactly the same way in two totally different situations?

Re:And Opera

Unfortunately that is an operating system problem.

We need a way to tell the operating system that some memory is important and other segments can be dropped at any time (cached or precalculated data) provided the application is told so it can rebuild it when necessary.

The OS scheduler would choose which applications are idle to the user and dump some of the applications data.

Re:And Opera

Is it just me or does it seem like 60MB or even 34MB is a LOT of memory for something that browses Web pages?

I mean, people used to make fun of GNU Emacs, saying things like it stands for eight megabytes and constantly swapping or eventually malloc()'s all computer storage. Emacs takes somewhere around 10MB or so on a RHEL4 box, and that thing is practically an operating system. It reads mail! Firefox doesn't even read mail, and it takes 60MB. Opera reads mail, but still 34MB seems just too big, too.

Maybe I'm just getting to be a cranky old man. Now you kids get offa my lawn!

I used to browse the web on a machine with 8 MB of RAM. Total, including the OS. At the time, real time decoding of a JPEG was extremely difficult, but my current CPU has 100 times the clock speed and is 64 bit and has vector processing features. Yet, browsers still seem to make the same class of CPU-memory tradeoffs that made sense on a 68030. For example, I may have ten tabs open in a window. I can only see one of them at any given moment, but the fully decoded images are all sitting in memory for all ten web pages, despite the fact that the page could be re-rendered almost instantly on a modern system.

Since browsing a few web pages is seldom the only thing I do with my computer, I go and do other stuff in Lightwave, Blender, Photoshop, whatever, then I come back to my web browser, and I wait while the whole working set gets swapped back in. Then, I click on the tab I want, and I wait while the working set for that tab gets swapped back in. If it just rerendered the page from the original bits, rather than using cached decoded images sucking up RAM and whatnot, it'd have almost nothing to reload and worst case performance would be orders of magnitude better. Hooray for "optimisation!"

Oh, and can we get some ninjas to fucking kill Flash. Seriously, I shouldn't need a bunch of script blocking and flash blocking extensions just to be able to browse the fucking intarwebs without having a seizure.

Yeah but it's still beta

I'm sure that low memory usage bug will be fixed by the first release candidate.

Re:Yeah but it's still beta

Actually, that 'low memory bug' has already been fixed - I've downloaded the beta and installed it on WinXP - after looking at 2 pages, Firefox 2 memory usage was at about 45MB; Firefox 3's memory usage was up to about 750MB after less than 5 minutes (and the same 2 pages; in two tabs, just as with Firefox 2.0.0.9), completely bringing the machine to a crawl (1GB mem; and apart from Firefox, Outlook, Eclipse and SquirrelSQL were open)...

I'm reverting back to Firefox 2 for the time being, and will file a bug report once I have some more time to find out what's causing the issue...

How are they measuring?

Are they using the handy dandy Task Manager? If so, this is not even remotely accurate. In the age of managed memory, this is an estimate at best. Don't believe me. Open up internet explorer, run it a while and look at the memory usage. Now minimize IE. Watch the number drop like a lead balloon.

Re:How are they measuring?

The Working Set (physical memory) size will drop, but the memory consumption (Private Bytes, Virtual Memory) will be the same. When a window is minimized, Windows mark the memory pages as candidates to be relocated in case of memory shortage. When you restore IE focus the Working Set size will return to the previous size.

Task Manager sucks, use Sysinternals' Process Explorer.

Re:How are they measuring?

Well - Microsoft may be distributing Sysinternals products; but Marc Russinovich's Blog postings are becoming less and less frequent.

AND - Sysinternals used to distribute the source on some of their tools. No longer. It's out there. But it's not legal.

Re:How are they measuring?

When you minimize, the working set size is reduced. This causes pages to be swapped out to the pagefile. When you maximize (or restore), the working set size is increased, meaning that the application is *allowed* to use more physical memory, but that doesn't mean it's going to immediately start loading back the same pages it swapped out. It's going to wait for page faults to compel it to do so. That is why #6 is lower than #2.

Strange, 1p/10 mins more than 12pp/5 mins?

Firefox 3.0 b 1:

Loading a five pages into the browser - 38,644KB
Loading a single page and leaving the browser for 10 minutes - 63,764KB
Loading 12 pages into the browser and wait 5 minutes - 62,312KB

I wonder what would have happened had he loaded 12 pages and let the browser sit for 10 minutes -- would the memory usage still be less than the single page/10 mins test?

Seems to me that memory usage must still spiral under 3 beta, otherwise how would the single page/10 min usage be less than the 12pp/5 min test? Sure, it's not as bad, but that number really caught my eye... more testing is in order if I can get some time away from the in-laws over the holiday.

Re:Strange, 1p/10 mins more than 12pp/5 mins?

Also, seems like a pretty crappy test to me, especially considering that most of the complaints with Firefox are with memory leaks, and not memory usage from opening a few pages. What happens after an entire work day of using the browser? Is there a significant difference in memory at that point? People who open their browser and look at 10 pages, then close it again will rarely ever have a problem with memory usage in Firefox. However, those of use who leave it open for days at a time, doing web development, and constantly looking at new pages are the ones who need to worry. It's like comparing the performance Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005 on a project that only has 5 classes.

Re:Strange, 1p/10 mins more than 12pp/5 mins?

Form the tests that the developers have been running, most of the memory leaks in Firefox itself seem to be fixed (there are probably still some left). However, memory usage still remains a problem. I think this blog post [pavlov.net] summarizes their findings. They've been using dtrace and other tools to find out exactly what is going on.

Unfortunately, I think the damage to Firefox's reputation is already done. There are many people who have had negative experiences with Firefox who keep on harping about the "memory leaks" and I don't see how Mozilla devs can change this public perception.

Don't take it anymore

I don't see that memory usage remains a problem for most users. It's just the vocal few who are having memory problems. The main problem is that these users assume this is part of the "normal" experience of using Firefox, so they complain that every user must also be seeing the same thing. They take no steps to fix or report their problems, as they consider the problem to be "well-known" and think developers must be idiots for not being able to see it.

If you're still having serious problems with Firefox, try creating a new profile [mozillazine.org] and installing the Firefox 3 Beta [mozilla.com]. If you still have problems, discuss them on the MozillaZine Builds forum [mozillazine.org]. If the problems do not get resolved, just switch to another browser. It's not normal to experience serious problems when browsing, so I don't see why anyone accepts it as part of the "normal" experience.

I agree that the damage to Firefox's reputation is already done. I've found that no matter how many reports come out that Firefox doesn't have a severe and obvious memory problem, the few reports that show a problem are the ones that become popular. If any of them just included instructions to reproduce the problem on other computers, those reports would be productive. Somehow, they always seem to leave that part out.

not to point out the obvious

firefox 3 doesn't have any plugins yet, last i checked it was plugin writers who were blamed for all the memory issues by Mozilla

btw i did same test in IE7 and Opera9 and only got 30-40MB usage

Re:not to point out the obvious

From the article:

Both Firefox 2.0.0.9 and Firefox 3.0 b 1 were installed fresh using a standard install.

Re:not to point out the obvious

What about a task manager extension for firefox that shows how much memory each extension is using? Seems like it could be useful. I mean, we know how much memory firefox in general is taking up, but it would be nice to get a breakdown of where that memory is going to.

Re:not to point out the obvious

You can enable extensions not explicitly marked as compatible with Firefox 3 beta by going to about:config and adding an entry for extensions.checkCompatibility : false. I'm running the same extensions and usage pattern as with Firefox 2 and performance is MUCH improved, especially AJAX performance on Gmail and shutdown/session recover speed. Of course, it has only been one day since my last FF restart. FWIW, I'm running about 8 extensions and have about 50 tabs open across 5 windows; currently on my 2GB machine Task Manager shows Firefox 3 using 235MB, where in the past Firefox 2 would easily consume ~450MB or even 600MB+ under similar workload. (Of course in the past I only checked Task Manager once FF's performance became noticeably slow, so this is not necessarily a good comparison.)

Another point regarding your IE7 and Opera9 tests: as far as I know, all modern browsers choose to allocate more or less memory depending on how much memory the OS reports as available (certainly Firefox does), so users on different boxes can show very different results.

FFX3 uses up all memory and causes thrashing

Can anyone else verify this on Linux?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404688 [mozilla.org]

All of these windows-centric tests

What I really care about is how it has changed on the linux platform (where I've never had an issue with it). Is it going to be an improvement there too?

12 pages? Who has 12 tabs open?

Come on, this is not a fair test. When I go to bookmarks/open all in tabs in a folder, I usually open anywhere between 18 to 30 tabs. In fact the first thing I do is to open all the editorial cartoons bookmark folder under "open all in tabs". By the time I am done with email, I will have the 21 cartoons ready to be perused.

BTW I never found old FireFox's memory consumption as annoying as intransigence of some sites in refusing to support Firefox and the lax/laisse-faire coding for IE only. May be because at work I usually have a couple of four processor 16GB machine for development/testing. I used to have a dedicated 2GB machine exclusively for Firefox. But that old machine's hard disk started squealing with an annoying noise so I had to throw it away. Even at home with my puny 512MB 4 year old desktop or the 1GB 2 year old laptop I get by without any serious memory issues.

not an issue

Memory usage really isn't a huge issue for most end-users. Sure if it was sucking up 800 meg with 2 or 3 tabs open people would complain but right now people are just starting to get used to the idea of tabs much less use 12 of them. The memory usage now is hardly a system stopper for most people who only run their browser and mail client and maybe an office suite and picture viewer.

Exact opposite on my machine

Either I got a bad build, or I've got a weird system setup. FF3b1 was using 180 megs (yes, 180 megs) of memory to load my intranet page, and would try and scream upwards from there before my poor IBM laptop (P3 800, 320 megs of ram) ground to a halt. FF 2.0.9 was using 30 megs.

I wish I could have submitted a bug report, but my machine would freeze before firefox actually crashed.

(and no, it does also take me 15 minutes to move a 20 meg file on my mac.....)

What a stupid "test"

Seems like the author is playing up to some feature in FireFox 4 that releases un-viewed pages from memory after a certain amount of time.

I bet if he re-clicked on each of the 12 tabs after the 5 minutes was up, that memory usages would go back up again.

"using less memory" isnt always desirable. I have 4 GB of RAM in my system and i'd rather if the applications USED THAT RAM, to keep application response "instant", rather than un-caching stuff, only to pull it back into memory again when I want to see it.

Re:What a stupid "test"

Don't do that. "But I want to keep my applications in memory!" you might say. That's wrong. Virtual memory systems these days basically use main memory as a cache for the disk. It doesn't matter whether a page came from a file, an anonymous application allocation, or anywhere else. The kernel automatically keeps the most frequently used blocks in RAM and pages everything else out to disk. By using 0 for swappiness, you defeat that automatic management and force the kernel to treat application pages specially. You don't want to do that.

Yet flash....

On Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 if you install the flash plugin nonfree package from apt-get flash works fine but whenever you try installing it from Adobe's site or the auto plugin installer, FF grinds to a halt on it using around 100 CPU on anything Flash related like Youtube or Slashdot's ads, disabling flash solves it, however on my other computer that is not much more powerful (slower clock speed of CPU but higher bus speed) when I installed it from the auto plugin installer it works fine getting only around 50% of CPU Max. Firefox or Adobe needs to fix this so Linux people can test the binary that requires you to install the auto-plugin and doesn't work with flash-plugin-nonfree. However, Firefox 3 is my preferred browser on my other computer and it was on Windows even more. My question is, why can't Firefox produce either a sane way to compile it (its a pain to compile it already...) or supplying .deb and .rpm for the builds to make it easier to install? Linux seems to be neglected by Firefox lately, with more strategy of stealing IE's market share then making a better browser on Linux. And Konqueror is painfully slow when on XFCE or GNOME (or just about anything thats not KDE) but perhaps KDE 4 will fix that....

Memory AND speed issues

If I don't shut down Firefox when I leave work for the day my system will be at a dead crawl in the morning - it shouldn't do this. (The only other program that acts like this is MS Streets & Trips). I am annoyed that Firefox is painfully slower to load certain pages - I do a lot of work for an in-house Quickbase application and MSIE blows firefox out of the water performance-wise, to the point where the same page in MSIE will load 3-5 times faster than it will in Firefox.

Won't be going back

So I started using the beta yesterday, and I can say that I won't be going back to IE or FF2. It runs extremely fast, stable, and is nice and polished. It seriously reminds me of the early releases of FF, but much, much faster. I've got about 14 tabs open right now, and its still running screaming fast. The earlier /. article is no lie, it installs in a heartbeat, opens fast, closes fast, even browses fast (as would be assumed given that it uses a smaller memory footprint, though I could be wrong about that). I reccomend.

Memory still an issue for me...

Installed and fired up firefox 3 beta 1. Went to visit www.speakeasy.net/speedtest, couldn't even hit enter. The default page wasn't even loading. My system slowed to a crawl. I checked the availible RAM, and of the 1GB I have in this system I had 2 megs free. Here Firefox was using 707.13 Megs of RAM... don't think the memory leak has been complete fixed (yes this was a windows machine...)

Re:Memory still an issue for me...

I wish I had mod points, because this needs to be brought to people's attention. Everyone seems to be claiming victory over the memory bugs, but for me (and you and many others) there are still random problems.

My system exhibits the exact same problem you describe. My Firefox will spike from around 66 MB of RAM usage to 700 then 800 then 900 and will just sit there chewing up more RAM until I kill it. I'd love to know the cause and even better, the solution to this problem.

It is happening in FF2 and in the 3 Beta. It doesn't happen on the same site every time. It happens most frequently when using JavaScript, but not always. I can't seem to narrow it down unfortunately.

Safari on Windows

12 tabs, 10 minutes, 133megs, but still stable and fast. FF is still my main browser though

Yes, but...

How much RAM did the Firefox 3 box have free after leaving it running a few hours?

CPU usage concerns

To be honset i can live with big memory consumtion, but i cannot agree on cpu usage. Quick test - go to [mmorpg.com] [mmorpg.com] site (widely known website), then check cpu usage (im sitting on win xp). I get almost constantly 50% usage by firefox.exe process

Just did this test in linux

FC 6 .. kernel 2.6.22.. Firefox 1.5.0.12 vs 3.0b1

I created a new user, logged in and loaded up FF 1.5.. opened up 12 tabs and logged into these sites

www.bbc.co.uk
www.slashdot.org
www.dailykos.com
www.news.com
www.abc.com
www.foxnews.com
www.freep.com
www.youtube.com
www.youporn.com
www.liveleak.com
www.rawstory.com
www.drudge.com

Here are the numbers for ff 1.5. The first line is when it loaded up with 12 empty tabs. The second line is the 12 websites loaded initially.. and the third line is 12 minutes afterwards

  3876 perfume 20 0 175m 54m 38m S 0.0 14.5 0:18.19 firefox-bin
  3876 perfume 20 0 348m 124m 49m R 72.0 33.2 1:47.83 firefox-bin
  3876 perfume 20 0 338m 135m 49m R 46.8 36.0 7:30.93 firefox-bin

I logged out, rm -rf ./.mozilla then logged back in and fired up FF 3.0b1.. same procedure, same 12 websites and 12 minutes of idling on them

  4231 perfume 20 0 202m 58m 38m S 3.6 15.6 0:11.79 firefox-bin
  4231 perfume 20 0 273m 106m 40m S 59.7 28.4 1:31.37 firefox-bin
  4231 perfume 20 0 254m 107m 40m S 1.3 28.5 2:27.26 firefox-bin

CPU usage seemed to be much better with FF 3B1 as well.. not sure why the difference but everything was clean...

Regrettably It Also Locked Up!

After about 2 minutes of use, 2 or three different pages online .. the new 3.0 slowed down my entire system to a crawl, and finally to a lockup. Had to pull the plug.

Rebooted (Win2K, 2.8 MHZ Pentium 4, 1GB RAM), manually fired up ye olde Firefox, went to same pages, ran fine.

Closed, re-ran 3.0 .. same problem.

Sorry boys, not ready for Prime Time IMHO.

Lockups bigger issue

Memory leaks are of course always bad and should be fixed, however, I have to say that a much more pressing issue is the tendancy for the interface to lock up ( especially on less powerful systems ) if one tab gets stuck loading or has to deal with a poorly coded javascript.

Mind you it is perfectly possible that the two issues are related, and since my knowledge about the inner workings of firefox are, to put it very mildly, limited, I suppose I can't really judge what kind of changes would be hard to implement and what the security implications would be etc.. I would however argue that the browser's interface failing to respond when it encounters a poorly written/ bloated webpage is a more devestating problem than a larger than necessary memory consumption.

Still giving issues

I just downloaded and installed FF3beta, opened up slashdot and BAM....

http://home.windstream.net/slashdot/pics/firefox3beta.jpg [windstream.net]

600+MB real memory usage

In OS X, I had to kill it when it used more than 600MB of real memory. I opened slashdot.org and dpreview.com and left it open for 15-30 minutes. Pathetic.

HTML vs XHTML

I would be curious to see how they both compare on badly marked up, but renderable HTML, and XHTML. Normally XHTML should require a smaller memory overhead, than HTML, because HTML needs so many special case handling in order to handle badly marked up websites.

Memory is not as important as Stability!

Although I'm sure there are some Slashdotters who run Firefox on a 350 Mhz PII with 256Mb of memory, that is really not issue for me. Most people with a recent PC probably have over a Gig of memory and more like 2 onboard.

CPU utilization where the browser all of a sudden is sucking down 100% of your CPU or of a single core and/or crashes are just as important (or more). More than likely the memory leaks have related browser stability issues that can be addressed with single fixes but if the browser continues to have runaway CPU issues and crashes it will not matter HOW small a footprint of memory it uses.

Whiskey tango foxtrot.

2 used 103,180KB and 3 used 62,312KB. IE used 89,756KB.

Someone care to explain why simple browsing consumes so much damn memory?

Okay, so I tried it...

Based on this and other encouraging news, I slapped it on the old desktop at work - where it subsequently tanked. Not sure why, and I don't have time to deal with it today, but it pegs the CPU at 85-100% and runs upwards of 800 MB's of RAM. I tried waiting it out, no joy. I tried dumping all of the cache, uninstalling, clearing IE's cache, rebooting, reinstalling. Still no dice. Even on a blank page (open new tab, close other tabs) it uses this level of resources.

My desktop is unusual, to be sure, but firefox 2 has always been fine. Perhaps later I'll find the link. Meanwhile, what should I have expected, it IS a Beta...

Meanwhile, FF3 Beta 1 is working perfectly on my laptop, and is much, much lighter.

About Time

It's about time they fix the memory leakage in Firefox.

Not convinced

After Opera crashed on me for the first time as I was searching for "Firefox" (must not have much self-esteem), I installed the FF beta and proceeded to read the comments to this and the other firefox-related story. Wondering about some sluggishness, I fired up the task manager and was surprised to see a 99% cpu consumption and a memory consumption that was rising by megabytes per second... while the beta wasn't doing a thing but displaying two slashdot stories with comments. Not even the fancy new comment system. I killed it at around 900 mb. The uninstall procedure is nice, though.

Tags

Whoever manually adds the tags to these sites misspelled one.
I'm sure that should say "whatisopera" not "whatiopera"

Just a heads up.

Efficient Firefox? Finally!

Wasn't the original point of Firefox (pre-1.0) that it was a rewrite that was supposed to use less memory and be faster than any other browser, as opposed to the browser in Mozilla Communicator/Suite (now Mozilla Seamonkey)? I have a friend who uses Seamonkey constantly and still swears it's faster than Firefox. On the other hand, I'm running several Firefox extensions, and whatever speed Firefox (2.0) is right now, I think it's worth it. (Opera tends to be very fast, by the way. I just like my extensions too much.)

Firepenguin vs. Fireborg

I think Firefox needs a new naming scheme that makes explicit what platform it is running on, since people so often say "I'm running Firefox and it sux thusly" without identifying the platform. Then we would mostly "I'm running Firepenguin and it works great for me" and "I'm running Fireborg and it suxors." Then we could simply say to the latter group: "I'm afraid you implicitly gave up any right to stability, security or reliability as you chose an OS that quite has no commitment to these concepts." Yes, I know some people have experienced issues on Linux boxes as well, I'm merely saying that the number is certain to be quite disproportionate.

That being said, many posting here have a little knowledge about how memory use and performance correlate. A little knowlege is a dangerous thing.The assumption that less memory use is better is absurd. If I have 1.5 Gig free and my browser is spending its time conserving memory rather than rendering pages that is VERY WRONG. If it is Linux, use the memory you need and let the Kernel handle swapping, etc. Don't WASTE it, but don't waste memory by not using available memory either." That is a much bigger waste.

Conserve memory when memory needs to be conserved , and use more memory when plenty of memory is available.

A slightly off topic aside, hopefully eye opening to some, exemplifying how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing:

I once requisitioned 16 Megs of RAM to add to the 16 Meg I had back in Win95 days. The typical person with minimal knowledge who thought he had a lot of it was trying to block my order, because he added 16 to his box and it still said 0% free so he concluded that "Windows just allocates and uses all the memory you give it." ROTFLMAO. I tried to explain to him about swapfiles and show him that the swapfile size decreased in proportion to the added RAM and why that was a HUGE win from a performance perspective, alas to no avail.

He told me he would be watching for my P.O. to block it, and I told him to have fun watching it go right through. I explained things to the CEO, who was not a complete moron, and he did in fact ultimately watch with gritted teeth as it got processed under direct approval of the CEO of the company. I figure we spent 10 times the money wasting time trying to address his ignorance than the actual RAM costs. The guy was quite an ASSet to the company :-)

Realworld Test: MySpace and Bebo

The sites these "testers" choose are hardly able to get any browser really worked up. They need to hit some of the uglier MySpace and Bebo pages loaded with all kinds of crap and see what happens. Preferably the stripper ones with lots of huge Adds banners and porno music videos. That's like natural selection for browsers, either they make it through the first few minutes of opening them or they just die, mercilessly.

My personal best with Firefox 2 on Windows was 780MB of RAM "Memory Used" and 785 "Peak Memory" on a 1 GB laptop before I killed that browser sessions like the mad dog it was.

What About The Swap File?

I've noticed that under Windows, applications tend to not release their virtual memory/swap file allocation. As in hardly ever.

I can run a firewall or AV program, for instance, and short of rebooting, there's just no way to reclaim it. Hence the memory leaks. ie - it's a glitch in Windows itself that so far I haven't been able to find a way around. Even memory manager programs won't free or touch this. So you get into silly situations where you have 1 gig virtual and 200 megs physical despite having 1 gig of ram.

Experiencing RAM/CPU Problems? Try Again.

I think we've got to the root of the problem that you and some other Firefox 3 Beta 1 testers are seeing.

Starting yesterday, we began receiving reports, like yours, of a new memory/cpu usage issue that happens shortly after a normal startup and can spike the CPU and chew up hundreds of MB of RAM. This is apparently happening to people with new profiles or in profiles that have a very outdated list of bad sites for the Phishing Protection feature.

What's going on is that soon after Firefox is started, Firefox tries to fetch updates to the site forgery list -- the lists of bad sites that allows Firefox to warn users about suspected Phishing attacks. If the profile has very outdated or no local list, as is the case for a new Firefox profile, Firefox is trying to bring down a complete, rather large, list in one big chunk rather than slowly in small chunks. This causes Firefox to consume large amounts of CPU and memory and can slow the users machine to a crawl.

This problem is due to the change in the "SafeBrowsing Protocol" which only affects Firefox 3 Beta 1 and nightly build users. If you're on Firefox 2, this isn't going to affect you.

The work-around for this problem was for us to throttle it on the server side. We've done that and if you try Firefox 3 Beta 1 again, it should be fine.

- A

Seamonkey

About a week ago I installed the latest Seamonkey. Since then, I've been using it as my primary browser. Speed and memory consumption are like night and day vs FF2. My only real complaint at this point is the relative dearth of extensions and themes for it, but maybe that situation will improve. I have encountered few, if any, rendering issues with Seamonkey, and the overall browsing experience is as good as FF in my opinion.

I've been running the thing for days now w/o a restart, and I currently have 11 tabs open and have had about half of them open for at least 24hrs and the other half for maybe 3-4 hrs. Under Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 x64) I see:
    PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ PPID SWAP COMMAND
14334 eric 15 0 220m 113m 24m S 0 5.6 26:47.68 14330 106m seamonkey-bin

In contrast, an average session with FF2 quickly eats up 700m-900m.

Seamonkey imported all my FF bookmarks, no problems, and I have the important (to me) extensions running - NoScript, Adblock+, Forecastfox, Chatzilla, plus a retro Orbit theme, and I'm a happy browser.

Why?

Why are we worrying about ram usage when we have multiple gigs of ram these days?

Re:Wow

Wow, that sure is some sloppy programming...How can a simple web-browser use almost 100Mb of memory?

The problem is one of your assumptions, Firefox is not a simple web-browser.

Re:This is irrelevant

Because mostly on Windows, most people's RAM is stretched to the limit, if a simple program that people use every day (Firefox) will decrease memory usage, then they can focus on speed and in the end, if Firefox can be 2X as fast as IE, Konqueror(and by extension Safari), and Opera people will switch to it. And I actually have around 512 MB on both my Laptop and Desktop with the Desktop currently running Xubuntu and my laptop running Ubuntu 7.10 happily. And when Linux can resurrect a "dead" system like a crashed Windows system that someone may give you for like $10 that happens to have 256 MB of RAM on it and a slower but usable processor like a Pentium III, Linux can run fine on it however, if FF runs slowly, most people have little need for a computer if they can't browse the web with it.

Re:Compared to usefulness? Compared to total RAM?

What Firefox needs to do is in about:config have an option that would be "Use RAM saving rendering" have it set as true but if you have loads of RAM just set it to be false, good for people running Firefox on slower systems and good for people with 4 gigs of RAM

Re:That's before it goes mad...

Windows XP is the same, I had a few tabs open, and it was sitting in the background. 4 hours later, my machine started acting up. I looked at the memory usage in process explorer, and Firefox was consuming 800MB+ of ram, while the Resident size was over 2G. This is on an XP sp2, with 1 gig of ram. Still needs a lot of work.

Re:This is irrelevant

4GB? Are you nuts? 1GB must be enough for everyone.

Re:This is irrelevant

Not all of us have the luxury of going out and just buying more memory.

I run into memory problems easily on my work machine, WinXP w/1gb ram. And getting this much was difficult! A typical work session will have:
- Firefox 2 with 3-5 windows into different email and PeopleSoft instances
- WinSQL logged on to 1-2 database instances
- Excel with nVision (PeopleSoft) add-ins, commonly 2-3 relatively small sheets open
- xplorer2 lite (file manager)
- Palm Desktop (PIM, Scheduler)


My personal WinXP/PCLOS dual boot is hardware maxed out at 2gb ram. I'm looking forward to the lower memory requirements of FF3.

Re:This is irrelevant

Anyone reading slashdot already has 4GB or more
I call bullshit.

desktop versions of 32 bit windows do not support more than 4GB of physical address space meaning ram usable to the OS is limited to some figure below that (exactly how much depends on the exact hardware configuration). Even if you are one of the minority that uses an OS that supports more the chipset may not. For laptops the situation is even worse, even if the chipset and OS support 4GB of ram 2GB sodimms are not cheap and I'm not aware of any laptops that support more than two modules.

On a system with 2GB of ram (which is the most many users can easilly and economically install) 200MB is 10% of your ram, that is not negligable.

Re:This is irrelevant

Offtopic? Moderator is on tryptophan [wikipedia.org] already. I didn't know they celebrated Thanksgiving in New Zealand!

(posted with a measly 2gb)