
Firefox 3 is Still a Memory Hog - nickb
http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/firefox-3-is-still-a-memory-hog/
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LogicHoleFlaw
Wow, this seems very trollish to me. The author doesn't account for the
various types of memory usage (shared memory, VSS/BSS/RSS, file swap, disk
pages)... This is an extremely naive measurement of "memory usage" being
presented here. Firefox now has an impressive test and instrumentation suite
for measuring memory usage. There are some highly tuned allocation algorithms
and garbage collection in use here. The poster doesn't present any evidence to
support his assertion but rather only vague suppositions and some hand-waving.

The article clearly displays the author's lack of understanding of how modern
"memory usage" works.

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ComputerGuru
There are four screenshots in the post and throughout the comments... doesn't
that count as _some_ evidence?

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LogicHoleFlaw
Unfortunately the "Memory" column in System Monitor is pretty much useless for
actually visualizing what memory a process is or isn't using. There are a lot
of different ways to measure memory for different situations. That column
doesn't actually give any concrete data on what's going on in the system.

[http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-
mem...](http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-memory-usage-
on-linux.html)

Gives the 10,000 foot overview of measuring memory usage on a Linux system.

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notauser
Would you rather they optimize for ram, which is cheap, or for time, which is
expensive?

Assuming an hourly rate of $30 and 100 web pages visited a day it would take
approx ~40 days to recover the cost of 1gb of ram if loading speed was
increased by just 1 second per site.

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mdasen
Firefox is a memory hog - you can't deny that.

Of course so are other browsers.

I've been using Firefox all day (6 hours now?) and loaded hundreds of pages
and have 8 pages open now (including a flash-based music player) and it's
using about 200MB of RAM. That IS hoggish. I just launched MSIE 7. Three tabs
(YouTube homepage, news.yc, and macrumors.com - nothing too heavy). It's at
140MB. That's hoggish too (especially considering how light a load).

So yeah, Firefox hogs memory, but I at least don't see a compelling advantage
in alternatives. I guess I just can't get riled up at this time of day.

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neovive
Maybe Mozilla is making Firefox more Vista-compatible. :)

Seriously speaking, the author didn't mention which add-ons, if any, were
installed. In the end, if Mozilla really uses this much RAM, it comes down to
a tradeoff: if you need to conserve RAM use the default OS browser (IE 7/8,
Safari, Konquerer, etc.); otherwise, to enjoy the benefits of Firefox, it will
cost you some RAM. This tradeoff exists with other software as well -- I still
use Photoshop over MS Paint, even though Paint uses much less RAM.

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Herring
restarting firefox: 15 sec

1GB ram at newegg: $30

posting atypical results as FUD: priceless

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henning
This really doesn't matter to someone who has a recent machine - my crappy
Dell laptop has 2 GB of RAM and Firefox feels very snappy. Casual users with
older machines with less RAM probably won't use Firefox long enough for it to
start using up lots of RAM.

It's not really that big of a problem.

For most computer users, spyware is a much bigger concern from the perspective
of performance.

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evdawg
Am I the only one who doesn't really mind Firefox using up a ton of RAM? I
mean, there is more than enough RAM in my machine, and then some...

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Tamerlin
I rather dislike it, because I have to kill it in order to free up memory for
Photoshop. My laptop only has 4 GB, and my image scans end up being around 1
GB each. I need that memory!

~~~
ComputerGuru
Same here, except with VMware instead of Photoshop. It's rather disconcerting
when Firefox takes up as much memory as an _entire_ virtual machine running
Windows XP....

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Mystalic
700,000 k at times for me.

It's at 400k now.

