Firefox Sieve

[Bill]

XP machine left on permanently to run all the programs that I have that don't like Vista/Win7 and normally also used to run email, news and browsing. Ages ago I installed Rapport for the banking, and haven't yet removed it. It slows down Ebay access, but otherwise doesn't seem to mess things up too much.

For the last about 2 weeks, Firefox has had huge memory leakage. It always leaked, but now it seems to happen worst overnight when I'm not anywhere near the machine. The machine has 2.5 gigs of ram. Last night at 1 am the memory use indicated in Task manager was 1.37 G. This morning at 8 am it was 2.40G.

The event logs showed a lot of information messages for gupdate (Google Update) not being able to find information in the registry. Firefox updates seem to be on and working correctly. I have removed Google updates - there seem to be 2 separate programs gupdate.exe and google update.exe, but this doesn't seem to have improved things apart from the event logs being less cluttered.

I'm now having to restart the machine when Firefox is listed as using

1.5gigs in Task Manager.

Has anyone else noticed this change in Firefox?. .

[David in Normandy]

I'm using Firefox 12.0 on Vista and it doesn't have any memory leaks. Maybe you have a leaky add-on? I use the customary ones: Adblock, NoScript, Flashblock etc without problem.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Bill escribió:

A lot of work has been done since FF7 to try and address memory usage, but I find it needs to be closed down and restarted occasionally to free up memory.

I've just looked at a Firefox session which had been open for several days. 18 tabs open, process manager showed it using ~580K increasing by

4k about every 8 seconds.

Closed down and restarted FF and the same collection of tabs now takes up ~260K, but the steady upward creep in memory usage still occurs.

FF 12.0 on XP SP3.

Tried Google Chrome but keep going back to FF.

[Brian Gaff]

Use 3.6 its not such a pig and bucket of odd bits as the later ones.

Brian

[Martin]

I tried Google Chrome and stopped using FF as my main browser.

[The Natural Philosopher]

FF7? I am up to FireFox 11!

Thats better!

BTW the usual place for leaks is in javascript apps. So close windows that run them.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Yes, it's turned into a steaming pile of shit. It's always been a bit problematic, but in an easily-managed way, simply by restarting the bugger every few days. The latest version (or two) have taken this to new extremes. I've been running FF with every add-on disabled and only put AdBlock back in, so far it's been a lot better than before.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

I tried that sticking with 3.x for as long as I could, but as time went on I found that quite a few sites didn't like it; bugging me with messages about my browser being out of date and sometimes refusing to do what I wanted.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oddly enough I find the later (post 3.6) versions have been relatively better and faster. It still takes a couple of hours to compile mind you so its staggeringly bloated ..but the worst of the leaks seem to have been fixed in its native form at least. But its always possible to write buggy javascript apps that create new items and never destroy them.

Or presumably java apps, or whatever the plugins run as..

I had an amusing issue with et wifes G5 mac. Firefox and also Flash plugins stopped several versions ago on PowerPC... Enough to cause many sites to tell her to 'install the latest version'... but there is a hack out there on the net where someone has patched the flash plugin to report itself as the latest version, even when it isn't..

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yup. In my case it was a question of designing websites that have to work across a lot of browsers..so I keep IE6 on an old XP VM for eh worst possible, and use firefox for the 'best possible...

.

[Bill]

Rather than follow up my own post here is an updated summary.

With Firefox I had experienced a massive increase in memory leakage, with Firefox itself sometimes being reported as increasing by ove 1GB overnight. XP SP3 on a Lenovo dual core laptop. No changes had been made to the setup or the sites set up as standard in 16 tabs. Firefox has always leaked a little, but this suddenly went ridiculous.

I have quite a number of plug-ins, all of which I have left running.

There were initially 4 add-ons enabled

AVG Safe Search 12.0.0.2163 Fast Video Download (with Search Menu) 4.1.6 FireFTP 2.04 SQLite Manager 0.7.7

I disabled all these and left the machine overnight. In the morning there was just a tiny increase in memory usage - nothing like the previous 1gig per night.

AVG Safe Search re-enabled

29/5/12 0830 PF Usage 1.50GB FF 257.2MB 29/5/12 1230 PF Usage 1.53GB FF 400.5MB 29/5/12 23.57 PF usage 2.01GB FF 792.5MB

AVG Safe Search disabled Fast Video Download enabled

29/5/12 23.59 PF Usage 1.51GB FF 261.3MB 30/5/12 07.22 PF Usage 1.57GB FF 291.3MB 30/5/12 10.24 PF Usage 2.31GB FF 271.1MB

Plugin-container.exe has increased to 121MB and CPU usage is 100%, with about 45% used by Plugin Container.exe and 40% used by services.exe. Running Process Monitor seems to imply that it is Rapport (a banking security application) that is hogging services.exe.

I will post this, disable Safe Search again and restart the machine before it explodes. It always ran very cool. Now, after running the processor at 100% for a few hours, the exhaust is too hot for my delicate hand.

Sorry this is OT. I started just asking if others had problems with Firefox 12.0, and, as always, this hole opened up to dig into.