Firefox running out of memory

[Cologne]

Hello all!

I have a problem with firefox. I am sure I have downloaded/installed the
last available build. Everything is going fine, but after 2-3 hrs of
surfing, I get a system warning: virtual memory low. When I look at my
process, I see that firefox is using 800 Mb (!!!) virtual memory in the swap
file. In ordinal memory it is using 237 Mb (!!!). The pages are rendering
slow and when I close firefox it doesn't return the meory to the system and
I need a restart. I have been having this problem about one year now and I
am hopping all the way that every new version fix this issue and I've
reported it 4 times now. Under the mean time I am going back to explorer
with tabbed extensions (which works very well, btw).

Anybody else having this problem?

 

[John]

Hello all!

I have a problem with firefox. I am sure I have downloaded/installed the
last available build. Everything is going fine, but after 2-3 hrs of
surfing, I get a system warning: virtual memory low. When I look at my
process, I see that firefox is using 800 Mb (!!!) virtual memory in the swap
file. In ordinal memory it is using 237 Mb (!!!). The pages are rendering
slow and when I close firefox it doesn't return the meory to the system and
I need a restart. I have been having this problem about one year now and I
am hopping all the way that every new version fix this issue and I've
reported it 4 times now. Under the mean time I am going back to explorer
with tabbed extensions (which works very well, btw).

Anybody else having this problem?

Check out this thread:

Firefox resource issue on 23/11/2005

Regards,
John.

 

[Lou]

Hello all!

I have a problem with firefox. I am sure I have downloaded/installed the
last available build. Everything is going fine, but after 2-3 hrs of
surfing, I get a system warning: virtual memory low. When I look at my
process, I see that firefox is using 800 Mb (!!!) virtual memory in the swap
file. In ordinal memory it is using 237 Mb (!!!). The pages are rendering
slow and when I close firefox it doesn't return the meory to the system and
I need a restart. I have been having this problem about one year now and I
am hopping all the way that every new version fix this issue and I've
reported it 4 times now. Under the mean time I am going back to explorer
with tabbed extensions (which works very well, btw).

Anybody else having this problem?

Help sources

FIREFOX:

s
THUNDERBIRD:

s
MOZILLA:

ssss
NETSCAPE 8:

s
NETSCAPE 7:

sss
NETSCAPE 6:

sss
COMMUNICATOR:

sssnews://secnews.netscape.com/netscape.communicator.unix

 

[jmatt]

What operating system & how much ram?

 

[Cologne]

What operating system & how much ram?

XP , 1 GB RAM, 3 GB page file.

 

[jmatt]

Do you have more than1 hard drive, also is / are they partitioned.

 

[wald]

Hello all!

I have a problem with firefox. I am sure I have
downloaded/installed the last available build. Everything is
going fine, but after 2-3 hrs of surfing, I get a system
warning: virtual memory low. When I look at my process, I see
that firefox is using 800 Mb (!!!) virtual memory in the swap
file. In ordinal memory it is using 237 Mb (!!!). The pages are
rendering slow and when I close firefox it doesn't return the
meory to the system and I need a restart. I have been having
this problem about one year now and I am hopping all the way
that every new version fix this issue and I've reported it 4
times now. Under the mean time I am going back to explorer with
tabbed extensions (which works very well, btw).

Have you already tried setting up a new profile? Maybe some
extension is going nuts and eating memory...

Wald

 

[Conor]

XP , 1 GB RAM, 3 GB page file.

What the hell do you need a 3GB pagefile for?

 

[Roger G]

What the hell do you need a 3GB pagefile for?

That's a Good Thing (TM) my boy.

 

[mArK]

What the hell do you need a 3GB pagefile for?

For enormous memory leaks?

mArK

 

[Aaron]

What the hell do you need a 3GB pagefile for?

Well there are some folks who hold the rule that you should set 2-3 times
of your RAM as swap file.

I think that's ridiculous, particularly if you have 1 GB Ram. You probably
don't need anywhere near that large a swap file.

 

[John Corliss]

Hello all!

I have a problem with firefox. I am sure I have downloaded/installed the
last available build. Everything is going fine, but after 2-3 hrs of
surfing, I get a system warning: virtual memory low. When I look at my
process, I see that firefox is using 800 Mb (!!!) virtual memory in the swap
file. In ordinal memory it is using 237 Mb (!!!). The pages are rendering
slow and when I close firefox it doesn't return the meory to the system and
I need a restart. I have been having this problem about one year now and I
am hopping all the way that every new version fix this issue and I've
reported it 4 times now. Under the mean time I am going back to explorer
with tabbed extensions (which works very well, btw).

Anybody else having this problem?

As Wald suggests, you should try uninstalling Firefox altogether, then
wipe out your profile (save your email and address book though). Next,
go into Windows Explorer and delete any remaining Firefox program
folders and their contents. After doing this, reinstall Firefox and your
problem should be corrected. You can at that point copy your email
folders and address book into your new profile.

--
Regards from John Corliss
My current killfile: aafuss, Chrissy Cruiser, Slowhand Hussein, BEN
RITCHEY and others.
Generally speaking, if I don't respond to somebody who is acting
immaturely, it's because I've killfiled them.

No adware, cdware, commercial software, crippleware, demoware, nagware,
PROmotionware, shareware, spyware, time-limited software, trialware,
viruses or warez please.

 

[Rili]

This is a well documented problem with firefox What you describe is
normal behaviour

It is discussed here:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/25/1817215
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2005-11.html#moz-images

After you close firefox, it needs a few minutes (depending on the speed
of your machine) to clean out all of the memory that has been swapped to
disk. When you close firefox, you should notice your hard disk light
going crazy as it tries to clean up the swap file. Once this has finally
stopped, you can then open firefox and use it again until the memory
consumption slow causes your machine to grind to a halt again. You must
be looking at a lot of webpages that have lots and lots of images on them.

At the moment, it appears (even in FF1.5 RC3) that this problem has
still not been addressed. It seems that it is a very difficult problem
to fix and since very few people use their browser like you do (I run
into this problem all the time at work due to my type of work, at home
it doesn't effect me) that the problem is not being given priority
unfortunately