Waterfox 28.0 memory leak?

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,369
10,067
126
I've had it open and have been using it for several days since last reboot. Currently using 1.5GB of RAM, with only 7 tabs open.

Memory leak, you think?

Plugin-container.exe (Flash Player) is only using 44MB of RAM.

Edit: I exited Waterfox, and restarted it, and clicked on each of my 7 tabs to re-load them.
Waterfox is now taking up 300MB of RAM.

Yep, I think it has a memory leak, pretty bad one too.

Edit: Also got a thread-stuck issue. CPU time pinned at 50% on a dual-core PC. Tried to exit, then CPU usage went down to 0, but RAM usage stayed at 1.2GB, for like five minutes. So I force-quit. When I restarted, Waterfox came up, and didn't restore, nor prompt to restore, my tabs. And my Flash Player plugin was no longer showing as installed. So it borked the profile.

So I uninstalled Waterfox 28.0, all my internet shortcuts lost their icon, and then I rebooted, and installed 27.0.2, and my shortcuts still have a generic icon, even though they work. I had to re-install Flash Player 13 again too.
 
Last edited:

ninaholic37

Golden Member
Apr 13, 2012
1,883
31
91
Heh. Isn't this what always happens when you keep browser tabs open for a long time? Maybe I just got used to early versions like Firefox 3-10.

I normally close tabs and re-open them in a new tab once in a while to clear the RAM "build up", but that's probably not necessary because the browser probably has it's own way to manage how much it should use at any given time for whatever it wants (I think it will try and use more RAM if you have more, especially a 64-bit version, my guess is that 1.5GB or more is standard fare for a machine with 4GB or 8GB RAM when it feels using that free/unused RAM will help). Maybe it's the dynamic content (like rolling ads) that are being saved into memory? I think it saves stuff from previous pages you went to in those tabs for faster access too in case you press the Back button or visit them again (though I could be wrong). Restarting with all addons disabled is probably a good start to narrow down what's happening though. I think typing "about:memory" in the url might give more info on what's taking up all the space, if it's "heap:unclassified" you might need an external program to see more details about what exactly is going on inside though.
 

Iron Woode

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Oct 10, 1999
30,887
12,392
136
I've had it open and have been using it for several days since last reboot. Currently using 1.5GB of RAM, with only 7 tabs open.

Memory leak, you think?

Plugin-container.exe (Flash Player) is only using 44MB of RAM.

Edit: I exited Waterfox, and restarted it, and clicked on each of my 7 tabs to re-load them.
Waterfox is now taking up 300MB of RAM.

Yep, I think it has a memory leak, pretty bad one too.

Edit: Also got a thread-stuck issue. CPU time pinned at 50% on a dual-core PC. Tried to exit, then CPU usage went down to 0, but RAM usage stayed at 1.2GB, for like five minutes. So I force-quit. When I restarted, Waterfox came up, and didn't restore, nor prompt to restore, my tabs. And my Flash Player plugin was no longer showing as installed. So it borked the profile.

So I uninstalled Waterfox 28.0, all my internet shortcuts lost their icon, and then I rebooted, and installed 27.0.2, and my shortcuts still have a generic icon, even though they work. I had to re-install Flash Player 13 again too.
did you install Ad Block Plus or Edge? It consumes lots of memory.