When I keep Firefox open for more than 2 hours, my system, a dual xeon with 2GB fast DDR, became extremely slow. I have the latest 2.0.0.2 version. A quick googling turned up many results on “Firefox leaking memory”, but nothing solved my problem. I tried EngTech’s solution & couple of other solutions. More tinkering around pointed me out to a plugin, which was the cause – Ad block plus! Removing it solved the problem, but now I need to find a replacement plugin.
If your Firefox is eating up memory, I suggest, start rootcausing by uninstalling the addons one by one. This’d atleast get rid of the addons from the problem space.
Below you can see the firefox memory consumption with and with out Adblock plus. Click the image to enlarge.
Before:
After:
Tags: Computers, error-message, firefox, HowTo, popups, Technology
A quick update:
I found another plugin to leak memory. Firebug v1.01. This excellent plugin, unfortunately leaks memory big time. Disable this, if you are not going to use this often.
Interesting… None of the testing tools show any memory leaks in Adblock Plus. So I cannot even imagine what is leaking there. Maybe Gecko is leaking plugin data when Adblock Plus is present, that wouldn’t be surprising given the issues with plugin handling (fixed in Firefox 3.0 alphas). Do the sites you are normally on have lots of Flash/Java objects?
Btw, Adblock Plus is an extension, not a plugin. Plugins are entirely different things – you can see a list of installed plugins if you type about:plugins in the location bar.
Thanks Wladimir. I do sometimes visit sites with heavy flash objects. I didn’t have this problem with my Firefox 1.5.x versions though; this started happening only after I upgraded to 2.0.x branch. I guess, my having to uninstall Firebug too, shows that the problem may not be with Adblock plus.
BTW, thanks for pointing me out the diff between plugins/extensions…for me (a normal enduser) everything is a plugin
Well, my suspicion is likely wrong anyway – I tried browsing YouTube and didn’t notice a significant increase in used memory. My own Firefox often climbs up to 250 MB memory usage but I know that it is Chatzilla accumulating too much data.