I posted a thread on this some time ago, but with renewed frustrations I feel compelled to address it further.

Firefox is still routinely eating up more than 250MB of ram. I've tried the about:config tweaks that limit cache and all that, and I've tried some RAM optimizers and other similar things. My questions are

1) Does the Firefox 3 beta solve any of these issues?
2) Has anyone else made Firefox not do this and stay at <100MB RAM usage (which is what it is when it starts up)?
3) Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance

I have an extra 1gb stick of DDR2 kicking around, and 2Gb more coming back on RMA...do you need any?

Get firefox 3 beta 5 or some other browser. Problem solved.

Mine is at 89 MB right now, and I've had it on for several hours

I didn't do it on purpose though

Mine's at 105mb & I'm 600mb+ into a 1.7Gb download..only one tab open, though.

68MB running three tabs Firefox 3 beta 5

A lot of times extensions cause those.

I'm only at 30MB, started a just few minutes ago.

Closed firefox (the one with three tabs), opened it again and now it's 17 mb. Srsly

So uhh none of my extensions work with ff3

What extensions do you have installed?

Also: I've been using Firefox 3 beta 5 at work, and it seems pretty solid. I'll try to keep track of what it's using in the next few days and report back.

Adblock and Cookieculler are two that aren't compatible that I regularly use.

Also Fasterfox and this pocket Japanese dictionary thing called Rikaichan.

Mines' been running for a while. 4 tabs at about 60mb with AdBlock, DownloadHelper, FlashGot & Filterset.G

Well, 3b5 seems to run under 100MB, which is good.

I leave my firefox on for days, though, so we'll see tomorrow morning whether it's still holding up hahah.

I just miss my extensions

Fasterfox is useless, don't install it.

As for the others, they will probably work if you do this:

go to about:config
add a boolean value (right click on any value>new>boolean)

Name it: extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.

Restart Firefox3. Bam, you should have no problem installing most. I know myself that Adblock Plus works fine (they even had a compatible extension for beta4, but beta5 came out only days later). Tab Mix Plus requires a "dev build" though, so look on the extensions' home page/forums for any dev builds first. Oftentimes you'll find builds that work.

two tabs, 40 megs.
Opera.

/kick

Just because you're smaller than me.

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is faster than Safari 3.1 on MacOSX



Saw this on Digg, thought it'd be relevant. Source

250mb+ here, but then, I have around 12 tabs open and firefox has been running for about...2 weeks.

I leave my work computer on until I really need to restart it or I feel guilty about the power usage, although tbh, half the time the computer is running jobs overnight.

love Cern Linux

62megs in firefox2 with 8 tabs open

this helpful guide will explain how to fix the problem: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Download_Mozilla_Source_Code

Serious post: Firefox now performs high-granularity allocations which helps address space fragmentation, but Firefox does nothing to solve the page fragmentation problem. It slightly improves the unending upwards spiral of memory consumption. There are a few ways to fix this problem permanently, but most of them involve spawning multiple processes and mucking around with that horrible futuristic "thread" concept which many people are afraid of for some reason. One good option would be a mark-and-sweep garbage collector, but the only elegant way of taking advantage of a garbage collector would be to rewrite mozilla in a real programming language. My personal favorite short-term option is to allocate one contiguous block of scratch space per webpage and spend the extra millisecond retrieving 5kb gifs from the cache but I don't have a neckbeard so what do I know

The people who run more than one instance of Firefox are the people who will have the lowest memory usage, because each process has its own address space which gets obliterated on exit. Also, when process manager says that Firefox is using 250 MB it's not (unless you're a stupid moron who disabled your page file, you stupid moron), because most of that 250 MB is highly-fragmented chunks of seldom-used resources which spend almost all of their time paged out to disk.

By the way, so-called "RAM Optimizers" don't do anything. They very temporarily coerce the OS into paging everything to disk and, consequentially, lasts about 1 nanosecond before the OS fixes the stupid. 99.999999% of tweak tools are the computer equivalent of bloodletting: you really don't know what you're doing, so why would you think that throwing leeches on the problem would fix it?

If a tool advertises itself as speeding up your computer, it's either a scam or it's doing something profoundly stupid to your system. Honestly. Performance computing is such a high-margin industry that, if it were possible to improve performance by making such basic and well-documented Win32 API calls as those "memory optimizers" do, this functionality would be built in to almost everything - from games to drivers and maybe even the OS itself. The reality is that memory optimizers do nothing. And unless you really know how Windows works - and I mean ex-Winternals kind of know-how - there are no tweaks or fixes that will give you any factual performance benefits.

Memory comes in chunks called pages. Applications cannot allocate memory in units smaller than a page. A special part of your processor transparently maps process addresses into physical addresses. Furthermore, RAM is a solid-state storage device which means there is absolutely no difference between 100% fragmented memory and perfectly sequential memory.

I know I'm being a bit of an ******* but this is a sore point. Memory fragmentation is both impossible to avoid and has zero performance cost. If you knew enough about computers to be able to intelligently decide that you needed a memory optimizer then you'd also know how retarded it is. I just don't understand people.

this

I wanted a memory optimizer for information. The two main reasons for me using the one i got, however trivial, were

1) I prefer it to Task Manager as a process manager
2) The tray icon cycles through various numbers if I click on it

Moreover I admit that though I had a general idea of how optimizers work (using the page file), I wasn't terribly familiar with the details and had the hypothesis that I could pull out an epic maneuver and take that one "nanosecond" to manually exit applications, as there were points when I couldn't bring up task manager due to the system being so ridiculously slow and I didn't want to have task manager taking up space on the desktop all the time and the ram optimizer allowed for me to do all of this from the system tray icon thus bypassing the need to have a window taking up space -- this plan, however, proved to be futile a the one 'nanosecond' didn't provide for any practical improvements in responsiveness, however brief.

Adblock Plus just released an update to improve beta 3 compatibility.

No that you mentioned it I've had one of those things running in my task bar for ages and it's incredibly stupid and annoying. I don't know why I haven't gotten rid of it until now.