IE 8 Internet Explorer 8 hogs memory

I like IE 8 for a reason it retains format when you paste excel data to IE. Table, color and everything stays as what it is in Excel. IE 7 has memory leak issue, you open few browsers, doing stuffs and it uses
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iexplorer.exe = 410,000K and sometimes even more.
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I thought this issue has been addressed in IE 8, but it's not. In IE 8, it is a bit better, but still I open 3 browsers, with 3-4 tabs in each browsers, it shows:
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iexplorer.exe = 143,120K
iexplorer.exe = 45,200K
iexplorer.exe = 243,110K
iexplorer.exe = 55,233K
iexplorer.exe = 20,512K
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Why it shows so many iexplorer.exe? Is it normal in IE8? At the same time if I open same with firefox, it only uses around 200,000K.

Is there any patch?

 

The only thing you can do is get the latest updates from Windows Update. Firefox too has memory leak issues, although many were patched up. Best thing to do if that happens is just to close and open up the browser again.

 

ie8 has several individual executables in taskmanager, because each tab is an own process for security and stability reasons (as well as the gui surrounding, again an individual process).

the result: when ever you close one such tab, all it's memory is freed. so the only one that could leak, is the main process for the gui.

how many ram do you have? does it really matter. meaning does performance go down because of ie using so much ram? because, if not, don't care.

 

A lot of browsers suffer from memory leaks; Firefox, Opera and Safari are no exception.

I had Firefox 3.5.2 open today and it reached 410MB of RAM usage too. Does that mean Firefox consumes too much memory? I doubt it; I had many tabs open with fully DLed video clips and flash tutorials open. The resource consumption of a program does, after all, depend on how much data the program is working with.

IE, like Google Chrome, is designed in such a way that each tab runs as a separate process; that way, if one of your tabs causes IE to crash, only one tab is lost instead of absolutely everything. You have that many processes open simply for sandboxing purposes.

 

IE seemes to use less ram than opera and use the same amount of ram as chrome.

 

interesting statement, jack..

 

Actually I kinda agree with jack here. Same amount of tabs, IE8 is running 1/2 of what Namoroka uses at this moment.

cheers ...

 

Just thinking isn't it part of IE8 that it uses more RAM because it can?

Also, RAM usage will depend a lot on site content - I think Flash eats a fair bi while simplest HTML uses very little RAM.

Oh, and all those badly "coded" sites...

 

It's actually called "sandboxing" and it's a really great concept in terms of stability and security. Chrome and IE employ this architecture while Mozilla plans to implement this in Firefox 4.

 

Yeah, every browser is a memory hug these days. good thing they can all save ur session though.

 

unless you are using a tool designed to separate and report on both physical memory and virtual memory allocations, this discussion is pointless. Look at things from sysinternals.com like process monitor and vmmmap.

Windows Task Monitor is worthless.

 

he just had a funny typo in there.. (it uses the same amount as chrome and less as chrome )

 

btw, to the OP. it is not a memory leak. it may use much ram, but a memory leak is, when the amount of used memory grows and grows and grows without any reason. that means, if you let ie run for, say 24h or so, it started to use up so much ram that all the os goes to the pagefile or even starts crashing.

 

I've noticed IE8 using a lot less memory than IE7 did on both my machines, actually. Of course I don't ever post Excel data into the browser, so I can't duplicate that exact problem.