[Discuss] firefox 4 is a memory hog

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 06/01/2011 07:28 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>> From: discuss-bounces at blu.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at blu.org] On Behalf
>> Of Matthew Gillen
>>
>> I've noticed lately that when I unlock my gnome3 session after being
>> gone for a while (several hours), it takes forever to get me back to a
>> useable desktop.  I initially was blaming gnome-shell, but it appears
>> the problem is actually firefox forcing the whole system into swap.
>>
>> Firefox was using 60% of memory.  Killing it and reloading the same set
>> of tabs makes it use 6.3% of memory (as reported by 'top').  I don't
>> think it's a particular web page that is going screwy, because it
>> happens at work and at home, and my set of tabs are completely different
>> (okay, fine, I use google.com in both environments...)
>>
>> Is anyone else seeing this kind of runaway memory usage?
> 
> 60% of what?  1G?  4G?  8G?
> 
> FF is a memory hog.  So is everything else.  Upgrade memory.  4G if all you
> do is web browsing and email.  8G or more if you run a myriad office
> applications and a VM inside it too.

It doesn't really matter how much memory I have (4G) , my point is that
the memory usage was a factor of *10* higher than it should have been,
and that the bloat happened while I wasn't even interacting with it.
Adding more memory to deal with a process that just eats all available
memory (which is what appears to be happening; my large swap partition
was fully in use before I kill FF) doesn't solve anything.

With the 3.x series I used to leave a firefox session up for a month at
a time.  Now it appears I have to restart it every day.  I'm
uncomfortable with the slide towards Window-95-style "oh, just reboot
every day"...

Matt