Comments on: Firefox Memory Leak

By: mlpilling

mlpilling — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:19:31 +0000

Elliot, thanks.

Removing firebug worked for me. I had the firefox problem when gmail was open as well – runaway memory which maxed CPU over a few hours. Bye bye firebug, bye bye problem. Go figure.

By: NettiCat

NettiCat — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:39:41 +0000

You are making a big mistake on how to measure the used memory of your processes.
You read the MemUsage column but your are missing the virtual memory of each process, so it�s only half the truth, in fact even less.

On each OS, if a process memory (measured as MemUsage) reaches a defined size, a part of the memory is mapped into the virtual address space (VirtualMem). So the actual memory used will NOT increase, ‘only’ the virtual memory space increases constantly. Note that the virtual memory is allocated by the process and cannot be used by other processes, nor by the system! Virtual memory still is part of the appropriate process.

So if you want know the real amount of used memory, then you have to ADD the values of MemUsage and VirtualMem for each process. To see the virtual memory you also need to display that column in your taskmanager as it is not shown per default. You will see a big surprise, it’s even a lot higher than shown in your taskmanager.

The problem is, that only few people know how to correctly measure memory consumption of processes.

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:24:04 +0000

I don’t even know what Firebug is, and hence do not have it installed, and my Firefox has blossomed to 1.2 gigs!

By: stone

stone — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:24:09 +0000

Why there always should be one idiot mentioning Opera in Firefox blog?

By: JJ

JJ — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 18:32:35 +0000

I have also had this same problem and I’m pretty sure that firebug is the issue. This issue is also documented here:

http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=127&can=4&q=

I personally can’t live without firebug, so I suppose I’ll just have to restart firefox now and then.