another firefox memory hog post

Okay, I couldn't resist on this one.... after clicking a link to a photo-intensive page, my laptop with its measly (????) 1.5 GB RAM came to a grinding, swap-induced crawl. First, I killed the tab for that page. Okay: time to start killing the few aps which were running.... leaving only firefox, with a few innocuous tabs still open, including my training diary which I wanted to finish updating. Then I dropped firefox.



Okay, so I screwed up that screen grab big-time. But if you could actually read it, you'd see 940 MB freed up by the death of the bloated firefox beast. Wow.

Okay, vent done. Back to cycling....

Comments

Ron George said…
im not surprised. how many apps/plugins do you have in firefox? if you do have a lot, those will suck memory too i believe.
September 8, 2009 at 7:05 AM
djconnel said…
I have a few:

● FxIF (Exif viewer)
● Live IP
● Live Validator (HTML validator)
● Ubuntu Firefox modifications
● User agent switcher

Each of these should be fairly light. The real killer is flash, and the two voracious apps are Yahoo Mail and streaming video (watching the Vuelta). It tends to not liberate the memory it takes, either. What I'm going to try is to switch back to "classic" yahoo mail. There's nice features in the flash-intensive version, like tabs, but the classic does what I need.
September 8, 2009 at 8:56 AM
Anonymous said…
Have you tried Chrome? There's newly a version for Linux. Chrome has lightning performance for some applications and doesn't work at all for others. I've ended up using Chrome for Gmail, Gcalendar, and Greader but continue with Firefox with its Noscript and AdBlockPlus for virtually everything else. The best feature of Chrome is that every tab corresponds to a different process, so even if (for example) a Flickr upload brings that tab to a virtual halt, the browser is still functional.

Note that memory usage numbers can be misleading; see http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/6819/2/
September 16, 2009 at 8:29 AM
djconnel said…
Thanks, Alison for the suggestion on Chromium! I really prefer it to Firefox. It doesn't use less memory, but the fact each tab has its own thread makes it far more manageable, I agree.

The real killer is flash, typically. I stopped using flash yahoo mail, switching to the "classic", and that helps somewhat. UniversalSports is another hard case. Really, I may stuff some more memory in my T60. It's a matter of principle, though: 1.5 GB should be enough! :)
September 19, 2009 at 5:12 AM
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