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Firefox Memory Issues October 14, 2006

Posted by Angus in Firefox.
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So I wasn’t imagining things. Seems like there are loads of other people that have been experiencing memory/performance issues when using Firefox - especially when having multiple tabs open.

So it is a feature that has caused the pain. From Element 14

‘Firefox does not have a memory “bug”, but here’s how you improve mem usage

Even after at least hundreds of posts on digg.com, even after a Slashdot article there’s thousands of people out there complaining about the Firefox Memory Bug. Lets get it straight. It’s not a bug. It’s part of the cache feature. This ‘feature’ is how the pages are cached in a tabbed environment. To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox’s memory usage can climb dramatically. It’s a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web.’

Apologies to Meebo from my post yesterday.

powered by performancing firefox

Comments»

1. Mike - October 28, 2006

It’s such a ball-ache. I am a huge fan of Firefox but both my PC and Mac notebooks burn up when I’m running it. FF2.0 no improvement either.

Eish.