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Comment by devNoise | Hacker News Reader

Will this help them figure out that they need to fix memory leaks?

They're already fixing memory leaks. In fact, Firefox now uses less memory than Chrome.

Let me guess, you're another person who hasn't used Firefox in a few years hasn't bothered to check out the latest versions at all? :)

For me, alas, with 5 windows open and many, many tabs per window, Firefox regularly climbs into the 1 Gig+ memory range. The solution: less windows and tabs, I guess. But I was hoping / expecting the memory profile to change significantly over the past few builds.

And yes, I am using the latest build, I check about:memory regularly, stripped out the unneeded add-ons, but maybe I've just got too much stuff open and those pages have lots of script activity.

Is my usage the issue or is there something that can be improved in my scenario?

It's hard to analyze memory usage. When you say 1 Gig+, are you referring to allocated memory, physically paged-in memory, or what?

There can be a very drastic difference between "virtual memory made visible to a process" and "physical memory actually used by a process", especially in the context of shared memory systems where you have 5+ processes that are able to share much of their text and data segments.

I don't have Firefox here so I forget, but does their about:memory page show the "proportional" memory usage? KDE's KSysGuard has a detailed memory usage calculator that can display stats like that.

If you have a lot of tabs open, you are going to use a lot of memory. Lazy tab loading helps after a restart, but there's unfortunately no way to just tell a tab to go away until you click on it again.

Are other browsers any better in this regard? 1 GB seems reasonable to me for "many, many tabs", I'm currently using about 500MB with 16 tabs, as rally is pretty bloated. Solution: install more RAM?

I have seen certain running web apps that leak memory across any browser they are run in. Firefox can't do anything about poorly written Javascript.

I use Firefox everyday as one of my main browsers. On version 20 right now and expect to be updated to 21 the next time I restart it. I've installed the "Memory Restart" add on, so that memory use stay reasonable. Once the memory size hits 900MB, I see performance decline. Over 1GB and I start to see the Beach Ball of Death. My typical usage is to have 2-3 windows open with 3-6 tabs open in each window.

While I feel Mozilla has tried to address the memory leaks, I still think there is a lot of memory bloat for my usage.

I'm using Nightly with AdBlock and vimperator. I see around 600MB RAM usage with 2 or 3 windows and 5-6 tabs.

What extensions do you have? I've also disable Java, Shockwave, etc. Try Nightly? I've never had a single stability issue.

I have most of the multi media ones enabled, along with a Logitech Harmony and Citrix plugins. As for exentions I have have Firebug, Web Developer, SQLite Manager, Memory Restart and BetterPrivacy. It may be time to reevaluate which plugins and extension should be running.

Other people mentioned the about:memory tab. Taking a look at it now, I'm seeing about 80-100MB difference between what that tab say and what the activity monitor says.

It is rather unfortunate that there was a couple years there that FF lagged behind Chrome, it is really still having lasting impact on the brand.

That said, the developer tools (both Firebug and the newer native ones) are really just not on par with Chrome now. I know they have people working on it, so I am looking forward to what they come up with.

The fact that there are both native and Firebug developer tools still baffles me- if they'd concentrated on one of the two they might be a lot more competitive with Chrome.

They're making a push to work on the native tools now. The native tools in Nightly are actually pretty usable now, though still not as advanced as Chrome. It'll come, I'm sure. :)

What's baffling about it? There are the native developer tools, but add-ons can still provide developer functionality.

The Firefox team has huge initiative to fix memory issue called MemShrink[1]. One of the devs blogs regularly about it[2].

I don't know much about this Health Report and memory leaks, but one the blogs on MemShrink said that to fix memory issues (leaks and memory bloat), they needed to measure what and how Firefox is using memory. There is now an about:memory page the gives a great breakdown, though it is very dev oriented and easy to copy/paste into bugs.

One of the big items that caused memory leaks is plugins. With FF15[3], made a change to find a very common type of leak with plugins that and free that memory.

If you haven't tried seriously FF in the past year, then give it another go. It is much better.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/ [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/07/19/firefox-15-p...

Browse over to about:memory

I run nightly and I don't use addons beyond adblock and don't run flash so perhaps my experiences are different, but I haven't had problems with Firefox leaking memory in a couple years. The profiling tools at about:memory may let you see where things are breaking.

Glad you mentioned about:memory. I usually read the changelog when they push out a release but somehow I missed that. This is a very nice breakdown of the memory.

about:memory has been gradually improved over the last two years.

Whoa. I just peeked at that and was astonished to see:

├───68.22 MB (28.62%) -- window-objects │ ├──41.12 MB (17.25%) -- top(https://twitter.com/, id=55)/active │ │ ├──39.86 MB (16.72%) -- window(https://twitter.com/) │ │ │ ├──18.17 MB (07.62%) -- js │ │ │ │ ├──18.13 MB (07.61%) -- compartment(https://twitter.com/)

Just to run Twitter uses a ton of memory?

Twitter loads a huge (several megabytes of source code, last I checked) blob of JS into every single twitter.com page. Then it loads a bunch of data, including what is basically a custom layout engine for some of their UI widgetry.

So yeah, running twitter uses a ton of memory....

~100MB for gmail.

No. They already have the lowest memory footprint. They don't need to figure out that they need to fix memory leaks, since they are doing it with great success.

But it will help them identify and fix current and future leaks.

Guys, maybe we shouldn't be feeding the trolls...

You would rather have the statement remain unopposed, as if fact?

Trolls don't care about facts but get off on people replying to their posts which is why HN has user voting of comments...

...and it worked

That depends how "obvious" the troll is. In this case, having no domain knowledge on this subject, I would prefer to see arguments against the troll as to why there are no memory leaks, then for the troll to be left unopposed but merely downvoted to oblivion (which would leave me questioning if people downvoted him for opinion).

I would really like to learn your criteria for calling someone a troll.

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