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by clarry 4571 days ago
> And if you want to claim that it's a memory hog, then you need to take a look at how it behaves on top of memory constrained systems.

I can confirm that Firefox regularly runs out of memory and dies on a system with a total of 1G of ram and 512M data segment limit.

1 comments

And I can confirm that if I load 6 tabs in Firefox and go to work, when I come home it will have eaten 2G of my memory, the next morning it will have eaten 5, and a couple of days later nothing on my system will run without disk thrashing because Firefox is sitting at 96% memory usage.
What platform? On XP, I leave a firefox session running for weeks and it only gets up towards 1 gigabyte (seems even less with some recent updates, but I don't keep a close eye on it).

I leave gmail and lots of other tabs open all the time.

(Mostly I suspect they are better able to find the leaks on Windows, no idea why that would be)

I have seen JS webapps that leak memory something awful. I have never encountered anything as bad as the grandparent post, but a gig or two of growth after a week of just one tab open containing one misbehaved web app is not unheard of.
Please file a bug, include an about:memory dump (use the "Measure and save" button), and CC me and/or mccr8.