why does my firefox hage a huge memory leak (slowing progressively over 1 day) since last upgrade?
Finally FireFox does not crash since the last upgrade. Instead there is a huge memory leak (or something with the same symptoms) until text crawls across the screen one...character...at...a...time. Reboot fixes, but problem recurs. Pages load faster in Safari even when FF is fresh. Fed up and considering switching to Chrome or Safari.
This happened
Every time Firefox opened
== last point upgrade.
All Replies (8)
Use Activity Monitor to check if it's really a leak. What is Real Memory for Firefox? What's the total memory on the system? How much of the CPU is used by Firefox and by other processes?
The usual suggestions in your case is Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems and Troubleshoot and diagnose Firefox problems.
I've already been through the basic troubleshooting and extensions and themes without success (though I found a memory leak utility that opened several dozen windows and kept opening more until I shut it down)
I'm not sure what activity monitor is; must be some windoze thing.
My Mac has 2G. According to top (a Unix command), Firefox is using 45% of the CPU after having been up for less than an hour. It's vsize is 818M. I generally reboot when the disk starts cranking and the laptop gets hot enough that I can hear the fan. Attaching screen shot with top output.
> I'm not sure what activity monitor is; must be some windoze thing. It's a Mac equivalent of Windows' Task Manager.
> It's vsize is 818M. vsize can be large without it being a problem, see e.g. http://blog.mozilla.com/dolske/2007/10/16/os-x-and-virtual-bloat/
You should look at rsize, which is still quite large in your case, though (500mb).
> I've already been through the basic troubleshooting Does it mean you get the attached top output when using a new Firefox profile (or at least when running Firefox in Safe Mode)?
Did you see Firefox uses too much memory or CPU resources - How to fix? The advice there is real, since for some reason Firefox on Mac can get more CPU hungry due to tabs than on Windows, in my experience.
The 'memory leak' (or other slowness) is recent. I'm pretty sure that the only thing that has changed is the FF point revision. The problem is new (previous versions had crashing problems that weren't much better) I'm running in safe mode, but I'll need a little more time for a comparable test.
I did find activity monitor. It says that CPU use of FF is 41% with RSIZE of 455MB.
I had FF running for about two days in safe mode under light use (the laptop spent a bunch of time sleeping while I worked on my desktop machine). When I opened it up this morning, FF was running at 100% cpu and the machine was thrashing.
I'm still looking for help on this problem. If there are no further suggestions I will switch to Chrome.
I just did another search for this problem and only found my own post. Am I the only person who gets FF consuming 100% cpu within a day of running on safe mode? I checked and right now it's too big of a pain to switch to chrome, but it's a thin line.
Same issue here. Also installed the FF extension Leak Monitor 0.4.5 as per Mozilla suggestion (there is so much leakage that the extension keeps popping up non-stop). I didn't have this issue in prior versions. Brand new problem with FF 3.6.6.
BTW, I got a lot of improvement after I disabled Flash. On the one hand, I have to use Safari if I want to view kittens doing cute things. On the other hand, I can't see Flash ads.