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Is 377,000K Memory Usage Normal for Firefox?
Kapellmeister
Posts: 41,322 Forum Member
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I run Windows XP on a Dell Vostro 1500 (2GB RAM).
Available Physical Memory is: 978.50 MB.
Total Virtual Memory is: 2.00 GB.
I'm sure Firefox never used to use more than 200-250,000K when I checked in Windows Task Manager. For the last few months (at least) it seems to be using more and more and it usually hovers around 360-370,000K even with only one or two tabs open.
Is this normal? It's not really an issue if it is. I'm just curious, and I'm sure my fan is starting to kick in a little more than usual.
Available Physical Memory is: 978.50 MB.
Total Virtual Memory is: 2.00 GB.
I'm sure Firefox never used to use more than 200-250,000K when I checked in Windows Task Manager. For the last few months (at least) it seems to be using more and more and it usually hovers around 360-370,000K even with only one or two tabs open.
Is this normal? It's not really an issue if it is. I'm just curious, and I'm sure my fan is starting to kick in a little more than usual.
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Yes, yesterday as I changed my antivirus and needed to reboot.
CPU usage when idle is very low but when, for example, I open Youtube CPU usage goes up into the 80s and 90s (percent) while the page is loading, and then goes back to 8% or 11%.
ETA: the reason I changed antivirus was because Avira (avguard.exe) was running at around 100,000K memory which I thought was ridiculously high. Avast! (avastscv.exe) stays around around 40,000K (which is what Avira did until a week or so ago before it started to increase). I had Firefox running at around 370,000K and Avira at 100,000K and decided to jettison Avira.
ETA 2: I've done malware scans, AV scans, etc. and there are no issues that I can see.
Logically it should not have affected the speed but it did so might be worth trying.
I'm running Adblock Plus, Personas, ColorfulTabs, Evernote, Foxclocks, NewTab Homepage, Google Translator, Status-4-Eva and Stealthy.
TBH - it's never slowed anything down, even if I add a couple of other things I use sometimes, like Wikiwand and Lucifox.
I've had my Vostro 1500 for years and it's always worked like a dream and never disliked my online activities. Now the fan tends to kick in quite frequently e.g. at the moment I'm looking at The Guardian website and opened a tab for DS and the fan has started (which I need to clean anyway). It would never have done that a couple of years ago.
I'll try some cleaning and see what happens. At least I know that my memory usage for FF isn't abnormal. It rarely, if ever, gets above 400,000K. I'm running Adblock Plus and Avast! Online Security extensions and that's about it (apart from the usual Java stuff, Shockwave and Microsoft stuff).
It's not really slowing down the PC. It's just seems a bit creakier than usual.
I also use Avast but not the browser add-on.
I'd say it would be worth going through your extensions to see if one may be causing a memory leak.
So I disable them all and then reactivate them one at a time?
With one tab open my FF is now on 325,000K
After deliberately switching to the XP for 10 minutes, that's running at 288k -three tabs, nothing too graphic intensive - while the laptop is on 368k (the contrary bugger has stubbornly refused to go over 400k since I posted about it
There's no ads running because of Adblock.
From memory (sorry about that) the XP never runs much over 300k, but the laptop has been growing rapidly since about 4 updates ago.
http://s3.postimg.org/jfh322k6b/task_man.png
Also look at post #68 here which will bring it down a bit.
Just seen avguard.exe using 43,392K ... that makes more sense.
It isn't unusual for browsers to use a lot of RAM, but there are different levels of used RAM, private vs shared memory, some applications hog and reserve blocks for their use, and will free it up if needed. RAM usage is a very complex thing, if you have a lot of RAM applications may hog more. A lot of RAM stored cached data of things that allows the machine to save stuff in case you need quicker access to it again.
As I understand it 'free RAM' is effectively wasted RAM as it isn't being used as all, and you actually want to use as much free RAM as possible for things you might do because loading stuff in from disk is slower. Available RAM is full of stuff that isn't important and is cached data, so it has stuff written to it, but it is available for other more important data and can be overwritten,
If your available RAM all gets used, then your machine will start "swapping" to the pagefile, which will use CPU and IO to do that and that is what often slows low spec computers down.
Older versions of Firefox had memory leaks, which if you left tabs open it would slowly use more and more memory until the system ground to a halt and you needed to kill it and restart the browser or even the machine, however this shouldn't be an issue in the later versions. Faulty addons could cause a similar thing through I think.
If you have a desktop, have you checked to see if the CPU fan is clogged with dust?
Yeah, I've noticed that the memory usage goes right back down to about 1GB after I've closed Firefox. The memory usage goes back to 1GB quicker when closing Chrome though.
I have disabled all my extensions (Adblock Plus, Avast! Online Security and DownloadHelper) and I disabled my FurFox theme in the 'Appearance' section.
I've got three tabs open now and the Mem Usage for FF is currently 210,000K which is a drop of about 160,000K from what is was earlier. With just one tab open it's under 200,000K.
Adblock was adding about 50,000K extra!!
DownloadHelper wasn't adding much
Avast! Security Online added about 25,000K (left it disabled as I don't really need it)
I think the issue was the Adblock Plus and the 'FurFox Tail Twister' theme I was using! The theme has not been updated since 2010 and, when I disabled it, it wouldn't let me restore it. With that gone the memory usage dropped by a lot. Could the out-of-date theme have been causing instability issues? It seems that way to me.
I've now enabled Adblock Plus and the memory usage has gone from around 210,000K up to 270,000K, which is still around 100,000K lower than earlier.
I'll check out the links about reducing the Adblock memory consumption as clearly it's quite greedy!
So if anyone has a similar issue: check your Firefox theme and check the Adblock extension.
After using FF for about 30 minutes with all the add-ons off, and with the default appearance, the memory usage started to creep up until it was at around 270,00K. It didn't seem to go down when I closed three tabs and only had one tab open. I restarted it and it's back down to 205,000K.
I've now disabled all the plug-ins (rather than just the extensions) to see what happens. I've set them to 'Never Activate'.
Thanks for the suggestion
All this suggests that the problem was a multitude of things:
Obsolete Firefur Tail Twister theme (that was a big memory drain)
Adblock Plus (another memory drain)
Dodgy plug-in somewhere causing the memory usage to rise and not fall
Earlier today, before I disabled anything, it would be up to 370,000K almost instantly even with one tab open. Now it's relatively steady at around 220,000K and rises and falls depending on what I'm doing.
Maybe not a complete success yet but I think it's a major improvement.
(I do need to sort Adblock out tomorrow though as the ads spread across the internet are driving me nuts. I never knew there was so many these days, lol.)
ETA: 20 minutes later and, with one tab open and everything disabled, it's stuck at around 280,000K minimum. I give up with it. I think I'll look into changing to Google Chrome to see if it's any better.
That said I don't have to worry about RAM on this machine...;-)
Same here. I don't have a tremendous amount. 8GBs is absolutely fine for me. I've not maxed it out yet.
I usually kill the process when it starts hitting 900MB+ as it starts to lag a lot (mostly due to Flash) - I only have 4GB RAM installed, with a fair bit of stuff running in the background.
That seems very excessive for internet browsing.
What the hell do you do to have 47 tabs open?