Firefox 4 RAM usage ASTRONOMICAL

[MarlboroLite]

I know that Firefox has pretty much been a memory hog for years now, and ever since I can remember using it. But I have never seen it get this bad since 4.0 was released. I am getting 1Gb of RAM routinely within half an hour of opening the browser, topping at times at 1.5Gb at times. I simply do not understand why Firefox needs to use that much memory.

It's not like I'm having 20 tabs open, with half of them being flash videos either. Even when I had tons of tabs and heavy sites open on previous FF versions I never once saw it go over 1GB of RAM.

This is frankly unacceptable. Is anyone else noticing ridiculous RAM usage since 4.0?

 

[GGJstudios]

Firefox 4 crashing and CPU hogging - Is this just me? - MacRumors ...
Firefox 4 Memory Usage
Firefox Hogging Resources/Being Laggy

 

[-aggie-]

Delete the plist file and you should be okay. FF 4 for me uses no more than 200 to 300 Mb of ram. Safari is another story, but I mmay have solved that issue by telling Safari to run in 32 bit mode (just did it yesterday, so we'll see).

 

[clevin]

its unfortunate development, but you got the sequence wrong.

Firefox 3.x has been phenomenon in memory management and uses much less memory than any other browsers.

Since they adopted new js engine, memory management was not the focus during the development. So now firefox 4 is indeed using 2-3 times memory of firefox 3.x. But it still does better than other browsers under heavy load.

Lastly, there is nothing wrong with using the memory as long as it doesn't slow down your machine, otherwise, what do you need memory for anyway?

 

[Donethat]

its unfortunate development, but you got the sequence wrong.

Firefox 3.x has been phenomenon in memory management and uses much less memory than any other browsers.

Since they adopted new js engine, memory management was not the focus during the development. So now firefox 4 is indeed using 2-3 times memory of firefox 3.x. But it still does better than other browsers under heavy load.

Lastly, there is nothing wrong with using the memory as long as it doesn't slow down your machine, otherwise, what do you need memory for anyway?

I'm also aware of this problem with FF4 and I need the memory for Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Various bits of CS5, mail etc etc. Crashes are not that rare so a solution would be nice.

 

[RabidBear]

Delete the plist file and you should be okay. FF 4 for me uses no more than 200 to 300 Mb of ram. Safari is another story, but I mmay have solved that issue by telling Safari to run in 32 bit mode (just did it yesterday, so we'll see).

Why does deleting the plist file do anything? I'm not very familiar with plist files and what they do so pardon my ignorance.

 

[MrChurchyard]

Why does deleting the plist file do anything? I'm not very familiar with plist files and what they do so pardon my ignorance.

"plist" is just short for "property list", they are just files storing the app preferences, so by deleting it you'll usually just force the app to create it anew with the default settings.

Edit: My bad, they aren't XML anymore but binaries.

 

[paolo-]

Yeah there definitely is a memory leak problem with Firefox 4. Mine just keeps going up until I run out of ram. Actually, yesterday, I was using 2gb of swap on top of a gig of ram. I only had a few tabs open but firefox had been running all day.

It kind of pisses me off, firefox 4 was looking so good: speed, customization, decent UI. I hope it gets fixed soon.

clevin, were you serious when asking what you'd need memory for other than a browser?