Memory usage by Firefox increases at crazy rate ?

When I start up Firexfox with different tabs around 15 of them and I don't surf , download anything , I still see the memory usage of firefox in the task manager increasing at a crazy rate.
It starts at around 100 Mb and after 2 to 3 hours of surfing reaches around 1.3 Gig , causing the computer to acct very sluggish.

QUESTION : how come that memory usage is increasing at such a high rate when I don't do anything ?

For example ; in the last 10 minutes memory used by FF went from 160 Mb to 210 Mb , that's 300 Mb/hour and I didn't do ANYTHING, no surfing,not downloading,etc...

IS THIS NORMAL ?

 

memory leaks?..... it's not uncommon

 

What is memory leak ? (nOOb here)

 

Depending on the pages/sites your tabs are on and the add-on that you install, FF will probably cache lots of things in advance when ram is available.

And if this behaviour of using more ram does not disturb your system performance, I wouldn't be bothered with it.

That's my thought.

cheers ...

 

memory pre-allocation is not memory usage. Much of what people usually think of as memory usage is in reality pre-allocation of virtual memory (paging space). It's not a bad thing.

 

Is it normal that after 2-3 hours of intensive surfing that my computer gets VERY sluggish ?

I have a powerful laptop with core 2 duo T7500 , 3Gig RAM

Never had that problem on my desktop that is even less powerfull

 

Browsing getting sluggish or the comp in a whole? And what is sluggish to you - more details?

cheers ...

 

It's not normal.. Does it do this every time :S? Mine rounds 200 MB at max if i have a lot of tabs and for example youtube open.

 

I just looked at my desktop and the memory usage stays at the same number around 150 Mb without increasing.

Sluggish when working in firefox, surfing on this site,in the beginning firefox is very snappy, click > within a second I have the thread opened
After 2-3 hours , it takes seconds to open a thread, it gives me the feeling I am working on a pentium 2

 

Yes, every time.

200 MB max is what I see on my desktop too , the crazy thing is that the memory used goes up at a rate of 400 MB/hour even when I don't do anything, just watching the task manager.
Now we are at 570 MB , a little more than 1 hour later when it started at 160 MB
The only thing I did , was surfing a little on this board.

 

Was recommended to start firefox in safe mode on the FF board.

LOOKS LIKE PROBLEM IS SOLVED , no action > memory stays stable and doesn't increase anymore at that crazy rate of 400MB/hour.

Extensions , add-on's disabled now

Memory usage has even decreased since a few minutes

 

sluggish browsing can be caused by any of the firefox plugins and extensions. even if you're not using them, they get loaded.

that your problem seems to have been temp solved by running FF in safe mode points to your extensions/plugins.

Another thing, and this is a a stab in the dark, could be your disk/ram caching settings. FF (and the others) needs to clean out the ram and disk cache from time to time. You could be hitting up against those settings. Having a huge cache is not always the best way to go. Try setting the ram/disk caches to the install defaults for a week or so.

 

How to do that ?

 

I noticed this problem as well, but it hasn't affected performance at all yet. Perhaps thats because I have 4 GB of RAM. Firefox ends up using 136,000 kb, with a good few add-ons.

 

I use Firefox without ANY add-ons and the memory usage can still get pretty large, albeit I have 4 GB of RAM, so it doesn't really affect anything.

 

Indeed, Fx itself over time does accumulate more and more. It can't be perfect... for people with less RAM, a good idea is to restart it once in a while when doing a long browsing session.