{"id":585,"date":"2008-06-03T17:23:52","date_gmt":"2008-06-03T17:23:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/2008\/firefox-3-is-still-a-memory-hog\/"},"modified":"2013-08-26T18:18:22","modified_gmt":"2013-08-26T23:18:22","slug":"firefox-3-is-still-a-memory-hog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/firefox-3-is-still-a-memory-hog\/","title":{"rendered":"Firefox 3 is Still a Memory Hog"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the biggest \u201cimprovements\u201d that Mozilla claims has made its way into Firefox 3<\/a> is improved memory usage, in particular, the vanquishing of memory leaks:<\/p>\n

\n

Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We\u2019re sorry to have to break it to you, but if you thought it was too good to be true you were right. Firefox still uses a lot of memory \u2013 way too much memory for a web browser.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We haven\u2019t seen it reach 1GiB+ like we have with previous versions, but it\u2019s quite normal for Firefox 3 to be sucking up ~300MiB of memory right off the bat, without<\/em> a memory leak (the difference between memory leaks and normal memory ab<\/em>usage is that in a memory leak you\u2019ll see the memory usage keep increasing the longer the browser is open\/in-use).<\/p>\n

\"Firefox<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Firefox<\/a><\/p>\n

This is a screenshot of Firefox\u2019s memory usage after just a half hour or so with only a couple of HTML-only tabs open. This particular screenshot was taken on Linux where Firefox is using the shared GTK libraries \u2013 on our Windows PCs, it\u2019s normal to find Firefox 3 taking up ~350MiB or so on both XP and Vista.<\/p>\n

The sad thing is that isn\u2019t<\/em> caused by one of the memory leaks that plagued previous versions of Firefox. It\u2019s Firefox 3 is supposed to<\/em> take up that much memory \u2013 at least, that\u2019s our assumption given how we\u2019ve never seen it take up less.<\/p>\n

Firefox 3 has a number of memory-hogging features added to the mix that are probably at least partially responsible for the absolutely gargantuan memory footprint. For example, Firefox now uses an SQL engine<\/a> to keep track of your history and bookmarks, amongst other things. While that particular feature is powered by SQL-lite, which should \u2013 in theory \u2013 not take up too much memory, we\u2019re at a loss to explain what else is wasting memory left, right, and center in the world\u2019s most-popular open source web browser.<\/p>\n

Things like full-text on-the-fly searching of the web cache for when you type text in the address bar certainly have an impact as well \u2013 that\u2019s a lot of stuff to keep in memory at one time. But Opera 9.5 does the same with a lot less memory, so obviously Firefox 3 is doing something<\/em> wrong.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a shame that Firefox 3 is on the verge of a release and is so terribly unfit to run on any machine \u2013 Windows, Linux, or OS X \u2013 with less than at least a couple of gigabytes of memory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the biggest \u201cimprovements\u201d that Mozilla claims has made its way into Firefox 3 is improved memory usage, in particular, the vanquishing of memory leaks: Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[60,654,77,564,901],"class_list":["post-585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-firefox","tag-firefox-3","tag-memory","tag-performance","tag-software"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t