Firefox 5 memory leak, decreases system performance

There is a memory leak in the current build of Firefox 5 that see memory demands increase, hogs system resources and will decrease your overall system performance. To gain your full system performance back you have to restart your computer, or you can use a program called Memory Restart. In Firefox 6 Typing "about:memory" into the address bar reveals dialogue with buttons at the bottom of the screen to help memory free memory that Firefox has used. This leak will be automatically corrected when Firefox 7 is released with increased garbage collection frequency and defragmentation of memory chunks.

I personally stopped using Firefox alltogether when finding out about this as I think it's better to use Internet Explorer 9 that's been recently updated through windows update than use a browser that has a memory leak, to me I ask myself the question who knows how much of the problem is actually being fixed and don't want to disrupt my PC performance the longer I leave the PC on, and since that could affect game performance.

 

Odd. I've left my computer on the whole week without any restarts and I use both Chrome and Firefox 5. (6 actually, on the Aurora channel). And I don't see any decrease in performance whatsoever.

 

Got a link to back this up?

 

In other news, water is wet, gravity is still here, breathing still an essential part of life...

lol Firefox has had memory leak problems since ... forever. They corrected it in a few versions of firefox 3, but it has to do with the way it handles addons and tabbed browsing - very easy to see why it's happening, very hard to fix without breaking other things.

 

Memory leaks is present since firefox 2, was slightly reduced in firefox3 but always present. A couple of day ago mozilla state they finally found the way to correct it, but since the tightly release schedule it new feature will be implemented in the upcoming firefox 7. I hope they introduce it soon.

 

To aid troubleshooting, the OP should probably deinstall and nuke all of his addons and extensions.

Mozilla/FF tell users time and again that 'memory leaks' are most often traceable to addons/extensions.

This is particulary true when new versions of FF are released. Older addons/extensions take a while to get updated to the new FF release.

 

People literally still use Firefox as their primary browser?

Wow.

 

Firefox usage share is 21.67% . I think this memory usage problem is linked to the browser itself, not the add-ons. The add-on Memory Restart actually fixes the memory leak.

 

um...no. memory used by processes are deallocated once the process dies.

using firefox aurora, the memory leaks from just leaving the browser open are gone - EXCEPT when you have some plugin being used. Flash in particular I've noticed, but thats just cause I just it the most.

 

i read it wrong. Said restart, not system restart.

 

I'm going to stay with firefox until another browser has Downloadhelper (download any multimedia file, like .flv), DownloadthemAll (batch download of jpg/png files), and Adblock Plus add-ons.

 

Was that sarcasm? I myself have been using a Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox browser as my primary browser since Netscape Navigator 4.0.

 

I have 8 GB of RAM so I don't care about any leaks! FF FTW

 

FF for me has had memory leak and slowdown problems since 3. All I have to do is close it once in a while.

 

Lol Rapter I'm with you! 8GB ftw!

 

You could have 32GB of RAM but you should still care about a program leaking. That's RAM that can be used to prefetch/ buffer.

 

do you really need to prefetch the entire operating system twice?

ps, FF8 is supposed to resolve the last of the memory problems. Look at blogs.mozilla if you're actually interested in what the problem is.

pss, yes, i AM tired of people calling it 'the memory leak' as if theres only one bad function and then ing that it hasn't been fixed in forever.

 

Hasn't Mozilla maintained for YEARS it's not a memory leak at all, but rather a "feature?"

 

Firefox 8 is 20% faster than Firefox 5, matches Chrome 14 | ExtremeTech

I'm a unapologetic FF user, but I'm not one who keeps the computer on for days and weeks on end. Windows likes to be restarted from time to time as well. Stay away from known memory leak add-ons, restart or memory dump, and buy some more RAM if need be.

Some of the office computers run Win 7 with 3GB RAM, so in this case I would maybe stay off FF.

Memory leakage does matter and should matter to anyone who keeps a well honed machine, but the utilitarianism of FF out ways this issue for me.

 

If you want some better memory management start using aurora or nightly builds of firefox. Been using nightly's since the beginning of minefield (firefox 4 alpha's) and only had a real problem 2 times. But memory in the nightly's is lower, that's for sure.

 

Is there a problem with that? Or are you just a troll?

 

General Rules:
- Cross posting, the act of posting the same thing across multiple forums, is not allowed. Please just post once in the most appropriate forum

You've said this before in other threads and I think we get the point.

The memory leak is devastating to FF users but everything should be cleared up by the time FF8 is released. For now, I will be the FF fanboy I am and keep it as my primary browser. However, when FF8 will be released? Probably by Late August or early/middle of September.

 

Devastating? I haven't even noticed it. Do you keep 200 tabs open or something?

 

don't hate....i try to keep it at 151 max...

it isn't TOO big of a deal if you use panorama. it won't load panorama groups you haven't opened yet.

 

Memory leaks have been plaguing Firefox in different degrees since version 2.0. It doesn't seem to be as bad with FF4/5, but memory consumption can go out of control depending on the add-ons installed.

I would recommend installing a small add-on such as Memory Restart 1.4. When memory usage becomes a problem you click the toolbar icon for the add-on and it restarts the browser with all tabs intact. Its not a perfect solution, but it is a reasonable workaround.

 

memory restart is different from just the normal firefox restart?

 

Thank you for recommending this extension. I will check it out and let you know how it goes and weather or not it helps the memory leak problem.

And no, I don't keep 200 tabs open at a time but I can still see my memory usage being used up when having a few tabs open with FF.

 

Memory Restart just puts a visible green/red icon in the Firefox toolbar that indicates excessive memory usage. Press it, and Firefox will restart and reload all tabs. If this functionality already exists in this manner, I'm not aware of it.

 

I was just wondering if does something different than the restart button you see everytime you get an addon.

 

As far as I know, I think Firefox's session manager allows you to "save and quit" when you try to close a window with multiple tabs, but Memory Restart just does everything for you.

 

haha, yes. personally i use restart firefox and system monitor.