Status of the Firefox memory leak?

[Daniel Robitaille]

On 5/12/06, Lee Revell <rlrevell at joe-job.com> wrote:
> Is there anyone who follows Firefox development on this list?  If so any
> idea what the status of the infamous "firefox memory leak" is?
>
> I left town for 2 days with 4 nytimes.com articles open in FF tabs and
> came back to this:
>
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  SWAP CODE DATA nFLT COMMAND      WCHAN
>  6965 rlrevell  15   0 2016m 146m S 16.0 34.2 405:50.50 1.8g   68 1.9g 1637 firefox-bin  sys_poll
>
> Seems to leak about 1GB per day.  It would be quite bad if this were not
> resolved for the Dapper release!
>
> Lee

a google search turns out quite a few things.  For examples:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_(Firefox)
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009749.html
http://www.squarefree.com/2006/02/04/memory-leak-progress/

It doesn't seem to be a Dapper-specific, but a problem in general with
the Firefox 1.5 series, combined with leaks when using gmail, specific
plugins, etc.

At a personal level, I have had some success of keeping my FF ram
usage low by keeping my number of extensions small,  and disabling
that  browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers setting, and restarting
Firefox at least once daily.   That seems to have decreased the number
of time I have seen Firefox really start leaking memory suddently;
something really annoying on my 256mb laptop.

I have also played recently using Epiphany and using once again  Opera
(Opera was my main browser in the Opera 5 era).  In both case, they
seems to use less memory than Firefox to start with and  I haven't
seen any sudden and  major leak yet.

-- 
Daniel Robitaille