Firefox uses too much memory

[Przemek K.]

Binary package hint: firefox

Firefox uses too much memory on 64-bit Intrepid. Memory usage rises up to 400-500MB. Especially after a few suspend/resume cycles on my laptop.
Now I'm testing the 32-bit Firefox binary from mozilla.org and it feels much better (only ~200MB used, stable for long time). I'm using it on the same profile, all extensions and data are the same.
Is there any way I can trace the source of this issue?

[mashiro (mashiro-tamigi)]

I have the same problem in Jaunty-64.

Opening 2 - 3 - 10 -50 tabs doesn't change the situation; sometimes the browser decide to take 50 MB without any visible reason; after 1 our reaches 650MB of occupied RAM and I had to kill the process.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Thank you for reporting this to Ubuntu. Which memory usage indicator are you using? Resident or Virtual?

[Przemek K. (azrael)]

What do you mean by that? I'm just using "top" from CLI.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Which column is showing the high memory usage? Also, have you tried
Firefox 3.0.11?

Przemysław Kulczycki wrote:
> What do you mean by that? I'm just using "top" from CLI.
>
>

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Nevermind. I'm assuming it's the Res column in top. Have you tried
Firefox 3.0.11?

Przemysław Kulczycki wrote:
> What do you mean by that? I'm just using "top" from CLI.
>
>

[Przemek K. (azrael)]

I forgot about this bug for some months, sorry for that.
Now I'm using Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit and the problem still exists.

azrael@laptop616:~/MyStuff$ top

top - 02:08:15 up 2 days, 3:05, 3 users, load average: 0.62, 0.53, 0.47
Tasks: 181 total, 4 running, 177 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 4.5%us, 3.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 91.6%id, 0.0%wa, 0.7%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2026412k total, 1972148k used, 54264k free, 98408k buffers
Swap: 2258780k total, 138564k used, 2120216k free, 552060k cached

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 1868 root 20 0 167m 33m 9840 R 7 1.7 39:34.44 Xorg
 3023 azrael 20 0 1553m 843m 20m R 2 42.6 86:31.13 firefox

I have a Macbook 2,1 with 2GB of RAM.
I have 28 tabs open now, my Firefox is running for about 2 days.

How can I trace Firefox's memory usage with more detail?

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

I'm moving this to firefox-3.5 as you're using Karmic now. That seems about normal for having 28 tabs open. Memory management is improving with every major update. Have you noticed an improvement between Firefox 3.0 and 3.5?

[Przemek K. (azrael)]

Yes, I've noticed some improvement. But it still seems huge: 840 MB
used by Firefox alone. Do I read the top output correctly?
This would mean that Firefox takes 30MB per tab.

--
## Przemysław Kulczycki <<=>> Azrael Nightwalker ##
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## www: http://reksio.ftj.agh.edu.pl/~azrael/ #####

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

It could also depend on how many extensions and addons. Have you tried disabling addons you don't commonly use? Perhaps you'd like to try Firefox 3.6 from the daily PPA?
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/ppa

[allan999 (allan-laal)]

Using 3.5.7 on Ubuntu 9.10 and its using over 600MB of RAM with 11 tabs in 2 windows open. Closing tabs does not decrease RAM usage, it just keeps growing slowly.

[Neville Makopo (kompressor)]

Using Firefox 3.5.8 on Ubuntu 9.10 with very little addons installed and its using over 1GB of RAM. This usually occurs when 4 or more tabs are open. Restarting firefox does not really improve or remedy this. Sometimes when this happens it freezes the whole computer...The laptop I'm using is a Dell Latitude E6500 with 2GB RAM.

[kamome (kamome)]

Shouldn't we use something like "pmap -d <PID>" instead?
I am on lucid with a slightly memory-constrained machine (512MB that used to be plenty enough for jaunty).
So this is what I see at the bottom of "pmap -d 3334" (firefox-bin's PID):
mapped: 253560K writeable/private: 175508K shared: 988K
This is a not-so-old session with only this single tab. I am not really shocked by the 253MB mapped, but by the 175MB.
I attach the output of the above command, one can see a lot of [ anon ] mappings, don't know whether this is important, here are all the anon lines mapping at least 1MB:

ab000000 51200 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
ae2ff000 8192 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
aeb00000 10240 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
af600000 9216 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
afffe000 8192 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b07ff000 8192 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b1000000 12288 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b1d00000 9216 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b3300000 2048 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b3700000 2048 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b3900000 1024 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b3d00000 1024 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b4000000 11264 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b4d00000 11264 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b58fe000 8192 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b60ff000 8192 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b6900000 9216 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b7400000 1024 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]
b75f2000 1096 rw--- 0000000000000000 000:00000 [ anon ]

[Brendan_P (brendan-p)]

Seeing have memory usage when Firefox is left running for a few hours. Up to 450m+ now. Running Lucid, so Firefox 3.6.x

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for firefox-3.5 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]