I've always wondered why Firefox uses so much memory. After a full day of surfing or if I leave the browser open for several days on end, I've seen some crazy memory usage. Just today, after 8 hours of continuous use, FF is using 108,240K. Photoshop us using less than 40K!
So whats the deal?
Check this out:
Firefox Memory Leak is a FeatureIn the comments, there was a link to this interesting blog post:
Memory leak progressI always assumed that the memory problems were at least partially due to extensions which may not be programatically efficient or sound due to the fact that anyone can cobble something together and, if its kind of cool, get a decent user base. Not only that, even a few memory problems spread over multiple extensions can be compounded.
So it sounds like FF has native leaks due to the nature of C/C++ and extensions have leaks which put all together leaves a humangous footprint.
The irony is that
SessionSaver, a really great extension, is one of the culprits mentioned in the SquareFree post. But to free up memory all you need to do is restart the application, and SessionSaver will put you right back where you want to be. So it goes...
Charles Wesley | Web Developer | SunGard Higher Education / Seattle University | wesleyc (at) seattleu (dot) edu