Firefox is hungry for Memory. . .
 

Does this happen to anyone else?

Since it's cold in my room (constant temperature change is bad for PCs), I leave the PC on standby and it generally never gets switched off unless I leave home for a few days or so. This means I only re-start it occasionally, so I often leave Firefox running for days at a time without closing it.

The latest version of Firefox seems to keep wanting more and more memory over time as I browse pages, though, starting from 50,000 kb just from having a couple of pages running. Even though I don't open any pages, FireFox goes "OM NOM NOM!" and the memory it takes up seems to grow and grow like a spiral, eventually getting to the 600,000 kb mark before becoming unresponsive and freezing occasionally.

I then close Firefox from the Task Manager and re-open it by restoring my session. It has the same pages open as it did when I closed it, but now takes up 50,000 kbs again instead of 600,000. It even died completely last week - It wouldn't re-open (froze on startup with a blank page) and I had to re-install the whole thing. :S

Anyone know why it likes to eat my memory like this? :P The other versions of Firefox didn't used to do this - I mean, it's Firefox. It's normally really amazing.

I find sometimes when I have WOW, MSN and Firefox up that Firefox steals the most memory and I have to shut it down.

Those are the rare occasions I actually appear offline on the forum list :p.

FireFox 2 is notoriously known for its memory hogging. When you refer to the 'latest' FireFox, are you referring to the new betas of FireFox 3? Or the latest branch in version 2?

Because as far as I'm aware from using FireFox 3 Beta 3, I haven't seen the memory hogging that used to be present in FF2.

Alcar...

I'm using the latest version of Firefox 2. Maybe I ought to switch to the Beta of Firefox 3 - It's an annoying problem. Seems like they're fixing it though. :)

Cheers, Alcar. :)

It's because it keeps a cache of all the pages you've opened so that if you press CTRL-Tab, the previously closed tabs (and their respective histories) are opened. Restarting Firefox clears that list.

I can't say I'm a huge fan of 3.0 Beta 3. I use it because it has a reasonably good page zoom on my teeny screen but there are a few irritating bugs (I'm using the Linux version) - sometimes it doesn't close properly and I need to go to the System Manager and kill the process and occassionally it will skip individual images within Facebook photo galleries. Do you get those bugs Peter?

Weird. Is there some setting or so which can stop it from doing that in the first place?

The Windoze version of Firefox 1 used to do that too. It messed up all my user profiles until I found out it was still running in the background. But at least it doesn't do that anymore.

No, that doesn't happen to me. It might be because you're running on Linux, but alas I have no idea :monster:

Alcar...

You sir, are the sole purpose for the death of the Polar Bears.

Yeah, I know it eats power when I do that. :P But then I use it pretty much on and off during the day anyway to check shit online, so what's the point of switching it off only to switch it back on again 10 minutes later unless I'm not going to be near it for a while? (in that case, I do switch it off)