Weird Firefox problem!

R

RockerGamer

I made one post
Joined
Jan 27, 2008
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26
Recently my firefox after closing has still been taking up large portions of memory and I have been forced to end the task in the task manager and by large portions I mean over a Gig of RAM.

Installed/Used Addons:
PicLens
BugmeNot
Colorfultabs
Download Statusbar
Facebook Toolbar
Foxytunes
IE tabs
Speed Dial
URL Fixer
Zotero

Please help me.
 
The ones that I would first suspect of being issues are Foxytunes, and anything having to do with Facebook. A couple of those I'm not familiar with (PicLens, Colorfultags, Speed Dial, URL Fixer, Zotero)

IE Tabs? Is that different than IEView? If it is, that could also be a culprit. IEView works fine without any memory problems.
 
I've used IE Tabs for over 2 years now, and have never had a problem. It basically allows you to change a tab to use IE instead of Firefox.

How quick do you notice the issue occurring, if it happens pretty quick, then you can disable all of your add-ons (Tools>Add-Ons>Disable) and see what happens. If the problem is then solved, then you know it's an add-on. From there, enable your add-ons one at a time, in order of importance to you, making sure you check to see if the issue starts occurring again as you enable each add-on. Do that until you find the add-on that's causing the issue. If you do find that it's an add-on, you can try to uninstall and reinstall it, but I bet you'll have to keep it disabled permanently. Good luck, hope you figure it out.

If the issue is still happening even with all of your add-ons disabled, let us know.
 
do you keep FireFox open for long periods? One of the biggest problems with FireFox 2.x is that it doesn't release the memory like it should. Problem is set to be resolved in FireFox 3.
 
He's not talking about memory usage while open, he's talking about memory usage after he closes the program.

I'm with Signe on this, my first guess would definitely be FoxyTunes. Are you stopping your music before closing Firefox? If you're not, it's entirely likely that FoxyTunes is still going through the motions in the background even if it has no outlet for the output. But you can't beat trial and error. Disable them all like Troth said and then flip them on one at a time, but that's dependent on this being a problem that happens EVERY time you close Firefox.


On an unrelated note, I've yet to see the memory usage problem resolved in Firefox 3. With the latest build it does use significantly less memory when started, but it still eats away at the RAM if you leave it open all day. So something is still leaking.

Edited because I can't spell to save my life in the morning.
 
Yes, he stated that he has to end the process in the task manager.
 
So, there's a program you can get called Process Explorer that might help you track down the issue. Something is keeping a file handle or a chunk of memory open, and if you can track down that process, then you'll be better armed to be sure what to do to fix it.
 
There's a few settings you can tweak to keep Firefox from sucking up too much mem...

Open 'about:config' inside a tab, and find these settings...

browser.cache.memory.capacity -- Target memory usage, in kilobytes. Default is '65536' (64mb), but you could probably go as low as '36864' (36mb) without much of a problem.

network.prefetch-next -- Set to false. Prefetches pages marked to be prefetched, typically used in search engines. Takes up unnecessary memory and bandwidth.

browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers -- Number of 'forward/back' pages cached per tab. Set to 2-4 unless you use 'forward/back' often.

But none of this will do any good if you have a lot of content-loaded tabs up and a bunch of glitzy extensions enabled...
 
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