Firefox uses WAY TOO MUCH RAM (~1GB!)

**Famicommander** · January 14th, 2009

I suggest using Opera. On every computer I've tried it on, it's been faster, more stable, more capable, and less resource intensive than Firefox or Chrome.

**cb34** · January 14th, 2009

http://www.tweakfactor.com/articles/...oxtweak/4.html

see if anything in here helps you. there's some tweaks for mem, but not sure if it is referring to the ram mem.

my iceweasel is super fast after tweaking it a bit.

ther is a program cpulimit.. maybe try to look for a ramlimit type of program...??

(opera has its own issues, and iMO it sucks.)

**sgissinger** · January 16th, 2009

Thanks for all these helpful answers.
I think I'm ready to pay the price of a relatively unstable browser, just for its awesome addons : I have installed the classic compact theme, firebug, fast video downloader, user agent switcher, world reference + google translator, web developer, measure it, gtranslate, fire ftp, gmail space, hots.ip geolocation plugin, unclosed tabs button, tab counter and .com url fixer. They are all pretty useful and I don't think they cause my RAM problem. Right now, it uses arounf 90Mb...

**sgissinger** · January 16th, 2009

And thanks for suggesting opera, i find it too windows-like but it seems it is indeed the best alternative. I had already installed it on my system but I only use it to check website compatibility.

**nonoitall** · January 23rd, 2009

There's definitely something seriously wrong with Firefox on Ubuntu. All I need to do is open it (with no extensions, no less) and leave it running for less than an hour. Poof! My system slows to a crawl with massive swapping going on. I don't even have to be using Firefox - it can just be minimized while I'm watching a DVD or doing office work. But somehow, it manages to gobble up 700+ MB of memory. (This just isn't acceptable for a laptop with 1 GB of RAM, with part of it reserved for the IGP.)

It's really weird too, because I've never experienced this on Windows at all, or even on Ubuntu up to a few months ago. I'm giving Swiftfox a shot though, and for the moment it seems to be performing well. (If it doesn't pull through, I shudder to think that I might actually switch from Ubuntu back to Vista in order to save memory.

)

**grndslm** · January 23rd, 2009

Have you tried saving your bookmarks (apparently you don't have any extensions) and then deleting the .mozilla folder in your home directory??

**nonoitall** · January 24th, 2009

Well Swiftfox indirectly led me to the solution. The problem (at least for me) doesn't appear to be Firefox itself, but rather a very common plugin: Flash.

Swiftfox didn't suffer from any of the memory hogging problems that Firefox did, but there was one little peculiarity: Swiftfox wasn't using Firefox's Flash plugin. I'd been wanting to try out the new 64-bit Flash plugin anyway, so I ditched the old 32-bit plugin and its wrapper and manually installed the 64-bit plugin. It still did not work with Swiftfox, but it did in Firefox, and surprise, surprise - Firefox's memory usage hasn't gone out of control since.

Obviously, this would only be a solution if you're running 64-bit Linux. I loosely followed these instructions to remove the old plugin and install the new one. Hope this helps someone else.

**seenxu** · January 25th, 2009

swiftfox is not in active development anymore!

Go have a look of swiftweasel, they have the latest pgo optimized ff 3.0.5, and no problem with flashplayer and mplayer plugins. At least in my case, after using swiftweasel 3.0.5, the ram usage(with seven addons) is between 260mb-330mb, on the contrary, ram usage of firefox 3.0.5 varied between 200mb till 1200mb, it is horrible!

I'd strongly recommend everyone who has ff ram usage problem go with swiftweasel or compile your own pgo optimized firefox.

PS:
my ram usage conclusions both are based on freshly created profile, newly installed addons.

**binbash** · January 25th, 2009

firefox 3.1b uses less ram than 3.0x

**OrangeCrate** · January 25th, 2009

As you discuss this, please remember that Linux utilizes RAM differently than what you were accustomed to on Windows...

Linux Memory Management or 'Why is there no free RAM?'

Traditional Unix tools like 'top' often report a surprisingly small amount of free memory after a system has been running for a while. For instance, after about 3 hours of uptime, the machine I'm writing this on reports under 60 MB of free memory, even though I have 512 MB of RAM on the system. Where does it all go?

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...c474f9f5e4dfcf