Firefox: system hog

Here's a screen grab from my Ubuntu 8.10 system monitor as I shut down Firefox 3.0.8:

Immediately after shut-down, around 100 MB is released. Then after 13 seconds or so, another 900 MB or RAM is liberated. What??? How can a single code tie up a full gig of RAM. How much memory do I need on this laptop?

I can start it back up again, same tabs, and I'm fine. For awhile. Then I need to shut it down again.

Either this is a memory leak problem (supposedly solved in Firefox 3) or it's a caching problem. In any case, it's out of control.

I've tried Opera, but I'm just not comfortable with that. Google Chrome? Not available yet for Linux. But it's a real candidate.

Comments

Itinerant Rick said…
My experience with Chrome on WindBlows is a mixed bag. Better performance with JavaScript and Flash stuff, but it has a really bad memory leak. I have to shut it down every hour or so because of that.
April 25, 2009 at 7:54 AM
chatterbox said…
I don't believe FF starts out as that big of a memory hog. But, I have the same experience on my work machine. It's WinXP, FF 3.0.8. If I leave FF open overnight, I will come back to a message saying "your system is low on virtual memory". I think it has a leak. Or, it could be one of my add-ons that has the leak. I'm running Firebug, Flashblock and maybe Yahoo Toolbar (not sure on the last one).

However, running the same version at home on my Mac, it does not seem to hog.
April 25, 2009 at 7:59 AM
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