Huge instability and insanely large memory footprint in 9.04

[Patrick Goetz]

Conrad Knauer wrote:
> 
> I'm going to guess, without seeing his machine, that it's something
> with Firefox... it could be a malfunctioning extension, it could be
> some script on an otherwise normal page... I would try backing up my
> ~/.mozilla folder and seeing if running FF fresh solves the problem.
> 

At the risk of offending most by stating the obvious, note that firefox 
-- especially when extensions are loaded -- has a continuously 
increasing memory footprint; even when you're not doing anything other 
than leaving it open on a few tabs.  And sites using javascript 
(especially those with lots of ever changing ads) are notorious for 
memory leaks.  On my MS Windows machine, after a couple of weeks of 
having firefox continuously open, the memory use goes up to about 1.2GB 
(the hint is that the machine ceases to repeat characters in a timely 
fashion).  Linux isn't quite as bad, but not by much -- below is the 
output from top:

   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND 

  8209 pgoetz    20   0 1877m 895m  45m S   10 27.3 576:27.11 firefox 

  7668 pgoetz    20   0  160m  17m  12m S    1  0.5  42:56.50 pulseaudio 


pulseaudio?  I'm not even using any audio applications and hardly ever do!

The linux kernel is a lean, mean, fighting machine.  X windows?  Not so 
much.  KDE and gnome?  Don't ask.  Firefox and friends?  See above.  The 
bottom line is if you're not running X, an Intel 486 with 256KB of RAM 
is probably a perfectly adequate platform.