After using Firefox for several days without restarting, my memory usage is extremely high. I have around 40-50 tabs open. Just now my memory usage was over 4gb and Firefox was extremely slow. After restarting and restoring all my tabs memory usage was only 700mb. I went and visited each tab individually to make sure they were all loaded and it climbed to about 2gb. This is a lot but not too unexpected for this many tabs open. I'm not sure how this doubles while keeping the same tabs open, though.
Is this expected, or the result of a memory leak of some kind? Is there anything I can do to free up additional memory? The "minimize memory usage" button in about:memory doesn't do much. I notice a lot of the memory is taken up by javascript. I'm running version 29.0, no add-ons other than firebug.
Best Answer
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.