Firefox extension fixes firefox memory problem

[Miramonti]

IDEVFH has just released his update to the Memory Fox Firefox add-on. This add-on recovers Firefox memory leaks by automatically flushing & recovering fragmented orphaned RAM. It's similar to the AFOM add-on, also by IDEVFH, but includes support for Songbird, iTunes and TweetDeck.

creator's page

mozilla link

Just started using it but reviews in various places are very positive.

Please post results.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Thanks!!! Please keep us posted on your results when testing, i'm definitely interested in this!

 

[her209]

Yes!!! Marked.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Neat-o, I often leave Firefox open for days straight. I'll see if this makes any difference.

 

[Nothinman]

I'd have to do some serious research, including probably reading the source, before installing something like that...

 

[ChaoZ]

My RAM usage dropped 10%. Sweet.

 

[Miramonti]

It's working pretty well for me. Memory seems to max out around 134k, instead of 500k+.

 

[EarthwormJim]

I'd have to do some serious research, including probably reading the source, before installing something like that...

It's just an addon. If it messes up Firefox just uninstall it right?

 

[0roo0roo]

not touching it until they explain how he magiced something into firefox ext that would be overlooked by the firefox team. either he's doing some weird sh*t or he's a genius. i'll wait for confirmation.

 

[Nothinman]

It's just an addon. If it messes up Firefox just uninstall it right?

Maybe, depends on what else it does while it's installed. I wouldn't even consider touching it until I know what exactly it does, just like I'm not going to install every registry cleaner and tweak tool I see because I consider them snakeoil.

 

[GrumpyMan]

Inquiring minds want to know, why wouldn't the developers of Firefox automatically include this if it is such a problem?

 

[Capt Caveman]

I'm currently using it. Yes, it definitely frees up ram. My FF can use up to 800mb of ram and using this extension, FF now uses 80-500mb and avg's around 250mb.

However, my page file has jumped up to 1gb from previously around 250mb. It looks like the extension just pushes the ram usage to your paging file.

 

[TAandy]

didn't work for me

 

[Nothinman]

Inquiring minds want to know, why wouldn't the developers of Firefox automatically include this if it is such a problem?

Obviously, cause they hate you...

 

[GrumpyMan]

Obviously. Thank you Captain Obviously.

 

[pcslookout]

Inquiring minds want to know, why wouldn't the developers of Firefox automatically include this if it is such a problem?

It is not a problem that is why. I had plenty of tabs open before, 30 +, with firefox and it only used 200 to 250 MB of ram. That is not bad compared to IE and Chrome. The reason people are complaining is of all the toolbars and addons they add to firefox which makes it slow down. Those same toolsbars and addons is what causes firefox to eat a lot of ram. If you look at the firefox addon page every now and then you will see the people who know what is happening with some addons. They complain about the memory leak with them. There is quite a few addons with memory leaks that includes for both firefox and chrome. I can name a few for you if you want me to.

 

[GrumpyMan]

I've never had a problem with Firefox and memory usage, I was just wondering what everyone was complaining about, and if it was a problem, I'm sure the developers would of fixed it by now. I don't use a lot of add ons though and maybe a max of 10 tabs open at one time, maybe that's why I have never noticed any memory problems. Thanks for the info.

 

[EarthwormJim]

It is not a problem that is why. I had plenty of tabs open before, 30 +, with firefox and it only used 200 to 250 MB of ram. That is not bad compared to IE and Chrome. The reason people are complaining is of all the toolbars and addons they add to firefox which makes it slow down. Those same toolsbars and addons is what causes firefox to eat a lot of ram. If you look at the firefox addon page every now and then you will see the people who know what is happening with some addons. They complain about the memory leak with them. There is quite a few addons with memory leaks that includes for both firefox and chrome. I can name a few for you if you want me to.

There is an issue though with Firefox and a memory leak. If I leave Firefox open for days (which I often do), I'll often see it using 500+MB of RAM just having the anandtech forum open.

Just because Firefox does better compared to other browsers, doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.

I never had the memory leak problem until around Firefox 2.0. It has definitely improved since 2.0, but it's still there.

This addon does seem to work, but I notice that the addon itself crashes periodically (once a day?), but it doesn't crash Firefox. I'm at 50MB of RAM writing this post and I have the Anandtech Fermi review open, despite having had Firefox open for over 3 days straight now.

I have not seen an increase in my page file size, and looking at the page pooling for Firefox, it's under a MB.

Don't addons run in their own process now? What's the process called in the task manager?

I don't really mind being a guinea pig for this addon, so if anyone has any suggestions for testing this out, let me know and I"ll be happy to oblige.

 

[0roo0roo]

yea but is it a memory leak?
it stays the same for days, shouldn't it eventually eat your systems ram completely eventually mine will use a couple hundred megs but i got dozens of tabs open, it doesn't grow beyond that.

 

[EarthwormJim]

yea but is it a memory leak?
it stays the same for days, shouldn't it eventually eat your systems ram completely eventually mine will use a couple hundred megs but i got dozens of tabs open, it doesn't grow beyond that.

Well it grows in size the longer you keep it open. That's usually what a memory leak is.

Within reason, Firefox should have similar memory usage if I only have a tab of this forum up after just opening Firefox up, or if I've been using the same Firefox session for days.

Granted Firefox has the restore closed tab option, so that will take up memory. But still I shouldn't be seeing Firefox use 500mb of ram for one tab containing a forum; especially if I actually close Firefox (new session) and reload this same forum in one tab, Firefox will use under 50mb of ram.


Basically with this addon, I can go from a huge Firefox session (using 600mb+), close basically every tab but keep the same session open, and go down to under 100mb of memory usage. That would never happen before.