Me again.. From Just sitting at this site.. NO add-ons installed. Fresh install of FF 9.0.1. no other tabs open, no other browser.. This is what I'm dealing with.

Adobe Photoshop, the program I used to open, edit and save the image, took up less resources.

Me yet again.. So I'm downloading 4 files for work. 3 video files and a 3d model poly file. Total size just under 800MBs. Other than that, nothing on my computer has changed.

This time the browser froze (white out when clicked) and had to be restarted.

I've also been experiencing massive memory 'leak' problems recently. Firefox's memory usage will jump from a farily modest ~400K to a massive 1.5 - 2 gigs, at which point it becomes unusable. Upgrading to 9.0.1 didn't seem to help. I'm running Windows 7 64 bit home premium with 2 x Nvidia GTX 570's in SLI. What I have seen though, is that this only seems to happen after the screen saver has been active. During normal use the memory usage seems to be fine. Hope that may help track the problem down.

Thanks for the reply.. I'm not sure that would apply to me though. I have 2 x DiRT3 Edition HD 6950s. No screen saver active. My memory leaks goes up with normal everyday use.. I can reboot, load FF and go to gmail.. FF will start eating up memory. It runs, but gets sluggish.. I usually only have to restart the browser if I download anything (more than 2 files at once) and/or go to any streaming, or image heavy sites.

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I'm having the same issue.

FF 9.0.1, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit - Intel i7 (920) - 6gb RAM - ATI Radeon HD 4350

After running a couple hours with gMail open and light browsing, firefox.exe will commonly be using 2gb+ of RAM according to windows task manager. Watching the memory gain on a single page, it accelerates progressively (starts at a couple Kb per jump, but works up to 1-2Mb jumps roughly every second). I'm on a T1 with bandwidth around 1/10th of that, so it's something within the program taking up space and not just downloaded data being cached.

I've updated my addons (Quicktime, Java, Shockwave, Silverlight) to the newest version with FF's update checker and tried disabling them, but it doesn't help. I also disabled my extensions (FireBug and PageSpeed) with no luck.

My screensaver is disabled, and the problem will occur immediately after restarting the computer.

Don't know how to diagnose the problem, which I'm assuming more people would be complaining about if it was common. Listed some of the computer specs - not sure if any hardware could be related to the issue.

FF9 started giving me massive memory leaks and processing slow downs. Here I found that the Nectar Search Toolbar I use seems to have been the culprit. Disabled it and FF is much more stable in its use of memory. Also the Nectar Search Toolbar slowed down FF start up and caused white outs where FF window would turn white.

Hopefully this info may help someone else.

Leo and Steve discuss this on the Security Now! podcast, episode 334, about 50:51 into the show (audio). The conversation gets interesting at about 54:10... I use FF very little anymore, and have gotten very used to Chrome.

http://aolradio.podcast.aol.com/sn/sn0334.mp3

pure ff 9.0.1 -eg NO addons AT ALL! Serious memory-leak every second ~20-40 kb increase This is NOT good...

I am running in Safe Mode right now with the 9.1 FF update on my OSX Snow Leopard MacBook, and Firefox (recently restarted but with a bunch of tabs open) is using 1.15 GB of RAM.

My free RAM was at over 2GB when the browser first loaded all the saved tabs, and now it's at less than 700MB free. If I leave it like this and keep using it, it will eventually eat all my memory (and I mean all - I've seen the Free Memory app report negative numbers.) I can literally sit and watch my available memory drop bit by bit until I have 200, 100, less than 50 MB free.

Again, I am in Safe Mode. All extensions are totally disabled.

I believe there's a connection to Javascript - I teach online in a Java based courseroom and I see massive surges in memory usage when I have my courseroom open. Facebook is another offender. But my Javascript Runtime Engine is completely updated.

Elusis: Don't confuse Java with Javascript. Totally different things!

I've been a long time user/proponent of Firefox, but find myself here reading this post from Chrome because I'm tired of dealing with performance hit my machines are taking from use of Firefox.

I was surprised to read that others are seeing their memory usage up over 1.5+ GB. I thought that was a fluke when I saw it on my own machine. And yes, platform independent; I work with both Windows and Mac.

Firefox is my favorite browser, hands down. I've always preferred Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox over the other options, but I'm growing increasingly more frustrated with the performance degradation.

Also, I stuck with 3.6 for a long time because I've had issues in the past with my extensions not running after version upgrades, and simply became overly frustrated with that, as well. I've grown to enjoy using Firefox so much partly for the customization and increased functionality it affords through the available extensions. I don't know how many versions I've blindly upgraded to recently in hopes of the new version addressing the performance issues. I'm an IT pro, and frankly, I've just upgraded without reading about the updates, simply trusting that Mozilla is pushing forth a better product, however, this accelerated release program puzzles me, as I'm not really seeing the benefit in these releases. They're all starting to look the same to me, except that each progressive release seems to perform worse than the previous one, not to mention it's taking away things I like.

As a user, all I would like is a browser based on the original Firefox model - a stable, secure browser with a cool ui affording function and theme expansion through add-ons. Granted, I understand the extensions are outside of Mozilla's responsibility, but come on, the extension authors can't be expected to keep up with this new version every six weeks, or whatever it is, and frankly, I'm just not seeing the benefit in upgrading so frequently, especially when the memory issues persist.

This problem does not seem to be resolved!!!!!!!

Is there anyone who can sort it out?

I've got several computers with Firefox versions 3.6 up to 10.0.1. In every one of them, the memory leaks are terrible. After being away for 4 days, I came home to find Firefox consuming over 2GB of RAM on my home server. On all versions, it has gotten so bad that I just can't use it. I split my time now between IE and Chrome - both only marginally better than Firefox. It's too bad, but I have uninstalled Firefox from all except this last computer. It really is sad to see Firefox go from being the premier product to now something that most users would prefer IE over. Way to really screw up a good thing, Firefox team.

The every-six-weeks updates must be their attempt to get their numbers up as high as the IE version numbers. Maybe they felt that was their best bet to compete with IE. They have a higher version number. The last usable version of Firefox was in the early FF3 versions.

I've got a bug generating a tilemap for html5 canvas games. I can generate maps 500x500 tiles (250k tiles total!!) in every browser except firefox, which chokes at 10,000 tiles (25x less than every other browser including IE, Safari, Chrome, and even Opera....)

Even my 3 year old HTC android phone loaded a 500x100 tile map which is 5x larger than the largest map Firefox will load on my DESKTOP!!!..........

Here's a version my phone and every browser except Firefox can load: http://simplehotkey.com/Tiles/main.html

If this isn't fixed I'm going to force users to install Chrome Frames when it comes out for FF and Safari to access my games.........which is coming out soon.......as a means of enforcing a certain level of performance.......

Yeah... It is pretty clear... The programers contributing to FireFox don't really understand the machine and what they are doing. If they did, FireFox wouldn't be eating memory version after version.

I used to think FireFox was the best, but now I know better. It is really trivial to hunt down memory leaks and fix them. But somehow, the FireFox crew can't figure it out.

So here is my advice to the FireFox programers:

NO MORE NEW FEATURES UNTIL YOU FINALLY GET A CLUE AND FIX THE MEMORY LEAKS. AND LET'S HAVE SOME ACCOUNTABILITY. IF THE MEMORY LEAK CAN BE TRACED TO A SPECIFIC INDIVIDUAL, THAT PERSON DOESN'T CONTRIBUTE ANY MORE CODE TO THE PROJECT.

Did anybody notice nobody associated with the development of FireFox wanted to reply to the message above? Is it because they don't have enough experience to know how to trace down and fix memory leaks? Or maybe it is because they don't care that FireFox has become unusable? Or maybe they are scared that if there is accountability they will be thrown off the project because they can't write code that doesn't leak memory?

It can be debated what the reason is, but the lack of usability of FireFox due to excessive memory leaks is not open to debate.

It is time to switch back to IE. At least that works!

I have FF 9.0.1 (too many bugs with 10 and 11). Part of the problem is Windows virtual memory management (Page Filing) not dumping closed out tabs (windows) off of the hard drive. Internet surfing new tabs and sites creates a huge fragmented mess on the HD along with temporary Internet files. Sometimes deleting temp Internet files and defragging will increase performance but not necessarily leaks.

I upgraded my old Dell desktop to 2 Gig ram for $60.00, turned off the Page File, transferred the temp Internet files to a flash drive and disabled all but the necessary plugins. There is hardly a peep out of the HD, I rarely have to DeFrag and page loading is almost instant. FF memory always returns to near original memory with one tab open after running multiple windows, leaving Yahoo email window always open 24/7, even in standby.

I have only a couple of third party programs running in the background - 34 processes total with FF not running. Running lean and mean helps overall performance. This is with two tabs open - this one and Yahoo email. The largest it ever gets is around 300K with about 5 tabs repeatedly opened ans closed. CPU is also quiet with no activity.

There are a few tricks with PRIORITY settings that may help but you'd need very few process eating memory, about 600K, total to do that with 1 meg

This is windows XP SP3 Task Manager with PRIO Proirity Saver add on for priority savings. The largest I've ever had this get is about 300K after changes.

The first thing I got rid of was Yahoo Toolbar and a lot of problems went away before all the changes - like I said minimum plugins. You might find several plugins not readily compatible with FF. For those with plenty of extra memory try turning off Page Filing.

Both FF and IE have their individual issues with slow typing due to Java problems here and there. I switched to FF due to new Yahoo email problems with IE8 but picked up a few with others like Twitter with FF. Type what you want in notepad, etc and paste into target window.

The problem is not Windows virtual memory management. I don't have memory leaks with IE or with Chrome and they're dependent upon the same Windows memory management. I never thought I'd see the day when I used IE as my primary browser but that's what I am doing.

The problem is sloppy development at Firefox. It seems to me that people there, in a very Microsoftish way, have just decided that quality and users don't matter. Just like Windows users are not viewed as Microsoft's customer - content and advertising providers are - it appears to me that Mozilla don't view their users as their customer. Not sure who is, though.