Firefox Memory Leak
I’ve been noticing some serious hard drive thrashing problems on my Ubuntu laptop lately after it has been on for an extended period of time. It didn’t take long to identify the problem; it appears as though the culprit is *gasp* the much raved Firefox. As much as I like Firefox, I have noticed in the past that it tends to eat up memory. Usually a shutdown of the browser and then restarting it back up again would relieve the problem for a while: classic sign of memory leak issues. Since I am running Linux, though, the problem is even more accentuated because over the course of a few days, I can sometimes have up to 4-6 virtual desktops set up, each populated with it’s own set of windows, applications, and Firefox browsers with multiple tabs. It turns out that the memory leaks in Firefox are notably massive. Today when I started experiencing the hard drive thrashing, I checked the memory usage and Firefox had allocated 486MB! Considering I only have 512MB total in my system, this is very bad.
This is a significant problem that is known and documented by the folks at Mozilla. I surely hope that they fix this bug for the next major release (Firefox 1.5) which is currently targeted for September. In the mean time, I have come across and installed the SessionSaver Firefox extension. Essentially it allows you to take a snapshot of all currently open Firefox windows and tabs that you can reload the next time Firefox starts. So when Firefox starts to bog down the memory, I can simply take a snapshot of the current session, shutdown Firefox to manually release the leaked memory, and restart Firefox to the exact configuration that I left it.
Even without the memory leak, this is a useful extension and appears to work well in my limited use of it thus far.
August 21st, 2005 at 6:15 am
Thanks for the tip dude, I really needed this…
August 21st, 2005 at 1:13 pm
Yeah so far this extension seems to work very well. One thing that I haven’t made much use of is all of the Firefox extensions that are out there. Perhaps I should look more closely to see if there are any more that would be particularly useful to me.
September 20th, 2005 at 1:01 am
[...] In any case, I still have not taken the plunge and installed Vector, but there was one interesting discussion in the above mentioned review that caused me to take a parallel investigative leap. Up until now, I have relied on both KDE and GNOME to serve my Linux desktop environment needs. For the past couple of years, I used KDE on Mandrake up until just recently when I switched to GNOME on Ubuntu. In both of these cases, I was using my old PIII 900Mhz, 512MB Thinkpad T22. The problem that I’ve run into lately is that GNOME is beginning to have a clunky feel to it on this system. It is well known that GNOME is fairly memory intensive; combine this with an annoying Firefox memory leak, and you have yourself a system that can really bog down. I tend to carry out several parallel tasks using open applications on multiple virtual desktops. The result is a lot of hard drive thrashing because the system keeps running out of physical memory. [...]