Firefox – Why does the Firefox memory usage keep rising with use and never returns to the initial level

firefoxmemory

I am primarily using Firefox as my web browser. I have noticed that after some tabs having been opened and closed the memory usage of Firefox becomes larger and larger.

This fact often leads me to crash it (deliberately using the task manager) and to open it again selecting only some of the tabs I need. There are cases where I open all my previously open tabs. The funny thing is that even in this case, the memory usage is by far less than what it was before shutting Firefox down.

So my question is why is this happening? Why does the closing of the tabs not help (at least not that much)? Is there a way to reduce the memory usage without shutting Firefox down?

Best Answer

Enter about:memory in the address bar. Click 'Minimize memory usage'.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-ram

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I have been running into this problem in Firefox for years. I use SessionManager to be able to recover after I forcibly crash Firefox and restart it, because I haven't found a reliable way to prevent Firefox from gorging on memory. There are plenty of extensions that purport to plug the memory leaks, though they usually only last for so long before Mozilla changes things to break them.

Today, while being irate at this issue and looking around SuperUser, I found an article that seemed to have something useful. 20 minutes in, and memory usage has stayed around 500mb, and it was ~3GB before I tried the setting. I did have to crash and restore Firefox though. I think the magic came from one or all of these settings:

Type “about:config” in your browser bar and adjust the following preferences (by double clicking on them) to free up some additional memory:
browser.cache.memory.capacity (set to 0)
browser.cache.memory.enable (set to false)
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers (set to 0)
browser.tabs.animate (disable)

There are also a smattering of other settings on that article that seem useful.

Firefox – Memory Leak in Firefox

Firefox has always had ongoing issues with memory leaks. While certain addons make the issue worse, even an up-to-date vanilla install can still have issues. If you don't mind third-party software as a solution, you may want to consider using a program called Firemin. Firemin is an external program that uses CPU resources to actively monitor Firefox's memory usage, ensuring it is as low as possible. The program is configurable, so you can specify how zealous you want the memory management to be.

Best Answer

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