@asuffield said:
@aythun said:@sootzoo said:@LightningDragon said:
the only time I restart FF is for extension installation (I love hibernation)
...and memory leaks?
What memory leaks?
It's not actually a memory leak. It's just a badly misguided caching policy.
A memory leak is when the application allocates memory but then loses track of it, so it's permanently allocated and unusuable. Firefox knows exactly what is in all that memory: cached, prerendered copies of all the pages you've visited recently, on the grounds that modern systems have a lot of memory and nobody runs more than one application at once.
That would explain why on my system FF is taking up >220 MB of memory, and the unreasonable amount of disk activity on resuming from hibernation. Anyway, I've never run into that sort of memory usage being a problem, except once, while running:
- DTP software editing a >50MB file with lots of huge linked pictures,
- Inkscape (which did seem to leak memory),
- Blender (3D graphics also eats memory, especially if you have even one 2048x2048 texture in memory),
- Photoshop (with one of the aforementioned huge pictures loaded)
The whole thing was almost unbearably sluggish, because of all the swapping that needs doing on a system with half a gig of memory, to fit all that in. Admittedly another part of FF's memory load is that I never clear out the list of downloaded files (a small load, except when viewing the list, when it has to be paged in).