But Opera 9.5 does the same with a lot less memory, so obviously Firefox 3 is doing something wrong. Things like full-text on-the-fly searching of the web cache for when you type text in the address bar certainly have an impact as well – that’s a lot of stuff to keep in memory at one time. While that particular feature is powered by SQL-lite, which should – in theory – not take up too much memory, we’re at a loss to explain what else is wasting memory left, right, and center in the world’s most-popular open source web browser. For example, Firefox now uses an SQL engine to keep track of your history and bookmarks, amongst other things.
It’s Firefox 3 is supposed to take up that much memory – at least, that’s our assumption given how we’ve never seen it take up less.įirefox 3 has a number of memory-hogging features added to the mix that are probably at least partially responsible for the absolutely gargantuan memory footprint. The sad thing is that isn’t caused by one of the memory leaks that plagued previous versions of Firefox. This particular screenshot was taken on Linux where Firefox is using the shared GTK libraries – on our Windows PCs, it’s normal to find Firefox 3 taking up ~350MiB or so on both XP and Vista. This is a screenshot of Firefox’s memory usage after just a half hour or so with only a couple of HTML-only tabs open. We haven’t seen it reach 1GiB+ like we have with previous versions, but it’s quite normal for Firefox 3 to be sucking up ~300MiB of memory right off the bat, with out a memory leak (the difference between memory leaks and normal memory abusage is that in a memory leak you’ll see the memory usage keep increasing the longer the browser is open/in-use). Firefox still uses a lot of memory – way too much memory for a web browser. We’re sorry to have to break it to you, but if you thought it was too good to be true you were right. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned. Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. I'd recommend starting with Memtest and going from there.One of the biggest “improvements” that Mozilla claims has made its way into Firefox 3 is improved memory usage, in particular, the vanquishing of memory leaks: It's possible there's a hard-drive fault somewhere, maybe when writing to the page file? Beyond that, I dunno. Use the Task Manager to check for large background tasks, though it sounds like you've done that already.
When in doubt, run MSE, "Microsoft Security Essentials" (probably the only bit of MS software that techies don't smirk at). I don't know what AV you've got, but if you're crashing, there's a chance a virus is behind it. If there are any problems with your RAM, this will find them.
Try running Memtest, a handy free memory testing application. That said, you still shouldn't be crashing, even if you've only got the ~3 GB of memory that a 32-bit OS makes available.
First of all, Windows 7 64 bit or 32 bit? (Yes, there's a 32-bit Win7 - my sister is currently running it on her netbook.) If it's 32-bit, then your 6 GB of RAM isn't helping.