Uh, wow. Firefox IS as bulky as they say it is.

[dragos240]

Today I wondered how much ram am I using right now, it came out to 768mb in use. All I thought was "wow". I closed out firefox, it went down to 282mb.I didn't have any flash animations running, or anything major, just some forum pages. Can I limit the amount of ram firefox is allowed to use?

[RiceMonster]

How much ram do you have?

[Quake]

Me, it's the other way around. I find Chromium/Chrome way too bulky for me. When I run it for a while, my swap keeps on getting bigger and my computer slows down. It doesn't happen with Firefox.

Perhaps that memory usage reflects the cache. Maybe if you limit the cache, it won't be that memory hungry.

[Telengard C64]

If you starve Firefox for RAM then it will run slowly or crash. Why not just do what everyone else does? Wait until your system starts using up swap and then close and restart Firefox.

Memory leaks. Aren't they wonderful?
:P

[jerenept]

Use Midori or Epiphany.

[Frogs Hair]

Here is one article http://www.ehow.com/how_2315525_reduce-ram-usage-firefox.html

[Lucradia]

Go visit a wiki page, dragos. Watch the ram build up over time.

DHTML, etc. can heighten RAM usage, and there's no single tweak or combination of tweaks to help that.

[DougieFresh4U]

Running Firefox w/2 tabs only

[dragos240]

Use Midori or Epiphany.
Neither render pages 100% correctly.

[dragos240]

How much ram do you have?
2gb

[Yes]

Then what's the problem?

Also, how many tabs did you have open? I've got four and am using 400 MB RAM overall.

[smellyman]

On my system if I open the same tabs in Firefox and Chromium, Chromium uses A LOT more RAM.

[RiceMonster]

2gb

You still have more than half of your ram left. Is is that much of an issue? Obviously that's a lot of ram for one program, but I doubt it's really having any effect on your system.

[Simian Man]

2gb

Why do you want to waste over half of your RAM? Firefox uses your otherwise useless RAM to cache things and provide a quicker experience. This is a good thing.

[renkinjutsu]

Chrome/Chromium uses a lot more RAM than firefox despite everyone calling firefox "bulky" it actually isn't.

The thing is that firefox's UI looks huge, while Chromium looks more streamlined (and launches/responds quicker). I think i read somewhere that chromium is very RAM hungry because of all their sandboxing security features.

Anyway, Firefox beta 4 is released i think. Go try it out!

[yester64]

Neither render pages 100% correctly.

Yes, Firefox has some problems rendering pages correctly.
If you load the same page with Epiphany it looks better and correct. Altough it does have also some minor problems.
From experience i only can say, you need more than one webbrowser to explore the web. One browser will not cut it unless you are willing to sacrifice.

But i never had any issues regarding ram use. I have 4GB ram so thats plenty of ram for a webbrowser.

[Legendary_Bibo]

I do think there is a memory leak though, not in FF, but somewhere in Ubuntu, and I think it's FF related. Yesterday I had Gimp and FF open and I was left with 30mb or RAM out of 4gb and things started really getting slow. I closed FF and Gimp sped back up. Currently Gimp is taking over 800mb of RAM after just booting my laptop, but I believe that's due to the amount of brushes and whatnot I have for Gimp.

[NightwishFan]

As long as the ram is not full you are fine. I think that if Firefox is using that much ram it probably needs it. Normal browsing with a lot of tabs (I tend to read one article after another) firefox usually uses under 100mb.

Personally I use Epiphany now. There are some minor issues (viewing attachment pictures on ubuntu forums I have to use a new tab) however it is very fast.

I did the sunspider bechmark myself and got these results. (Lower is better)

[LowSky]

FF is only using 40MB for me just browsing the forums.

If you want to save RAM, turn down page caching and browser history.

[Firestem4]

People, please keep in mind that Firefox actively uses the Cache (and as such every picture you've veiwed in the last few minutes/browsing session could be in RAM. This adds up quickly. If you have cleared all your temp files and had 1 page open, im sure you'll have a much smaller browser footprint.

[lovinglinux]

As other users already stated, Chrome/mium uses a lot more RAM.

I'm currently running Firefox for a couple of hours with 59 extensions enabled and it is using only 200Mb. I don't do many tabs tho. I always close tabs if I'm not using them.

My browser.cache.memory.capacity is set to 14336. I have 2Gb RAM and don't have any problems.

A clean profile uses about 40Mb.


Go visit a wiki page, dragos. Watch the ram build up over time.

DHTML, etc. can heighten RAM usage, and there's no single tweak or combination of tweaks to help that.

Edit blogger widgets for a couple of minutes and you will see a huge increase in memory usage. I suspect is DHTML indeed.

@dragos

Another thing to consider is that you could have some extensions leaking memory.