Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.

See "Creating a profile":

• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Standard_diagnostic_-_Firefox#Profile_issues

If the new profile works then you can transfer some files from an existing profile to the new profile, but be cautious not to copy corrupted files to avoid carrying over the problem.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Firefox

Thanks for the reply. This has been done every time I have installed a new Linux distro on my computers 3-4 times a month for the past few months, and three times on Windows. It never makes a difference. Loading an old one also makes no measurable difference.

Have you disabled hardware acceleration?

• Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems

"GPU Accelerated Windows 0/2 Basic Blocked for your graphics driver version. Try updating your graphics driver to version <Something recent> or newer. Vendor ID ATI Technologies Inc. WebGL Renderer Blocked for your graphics driver version. Try updating your graphics driver to version <Something recent> or newer."

I've never had any luck getting it working under Linux. BUt just to be sure I disabled it, and there is still no difference. It's not a memory leak as Firefox is still using the same amount of RAM when I close it as when I open it to all of the pages I had open.

>has 16GB ram >uses FF >still complains

Are you sure all your graphics drivers are updated, refresh the db in your package manager (like Synaptic) and mark all upgrades.

I'm using Catalyst 13.8 Beta straight from AMD because I'm using xorg-server 1.14 on arch.

Are you using 32 bit or 64 bit Firefox? Can you test the 64 bit version?

nightly.mozilla.org

Is Firefox actively using this memory or only reserving it as virtual memory?

You can check the memory usage on the about:memory page.

I'm using a 64 bit Linux build according to pacman.

Also according the user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0

@cor-el

   1.56 MB ── canvas-2d-pixel-bytes
  10.52 MB ── gfx-surface-image
  64.87 MB ── gfx-surface-xlib
   0.00 MB ── gfx-textures
         0 ── ghost-windows
 387.09 MB ── heap-allocated
 445.63 MB ── heap-committed
  58.57 MB ── heap-committed-unused
    15.14% ── heap-committed-unused-ratio
   3.57 MB ── heap-dirty
 153.90 MB ── heap-unused
   6.09 MB ── images-content-used-uncompressed
 240.00 MB ── js-gc-heap
   1.56 MB ── js-main-runtime-temporary-peak
        26 ── page-faults-hard
 8,499,977 ── page-faults-soft
 688.90 MB ── resident
 666.79 MB ── resident-unique
  11.04 MB ── storage-sqlite

1,489.26 MB ── vsize

I hope that's what you were looking for.

You can hover each of those entries to see a description as you can see at the bottom of the about:memory page.
It says that resident is better suited to get an impression of the memory usage because that is the actual amount of physical memory that is in use. So 688 MB physical memory isn't that much.

Does this amount change if you start Firefox with no tabs opening?

You can also try to click the button to minimize the memory usage.

Then why is htop reporting that it's using almost 1.6GB? If I understand it right, resident memory is the amount of physical memory the process is using. However according to htop, if I were to fill all but 1GB of my RAM up with something like a RAMDisk using ramfs, and fill it up with data from /dev/random, it would start writing to SWAP even though according to the resident memory usage in Firefox it shouldn't have to touch swap.

EDIT: Spamming CC, GC, and the minimize memory button shaved about 30MB off of the resident usage, however, as I understand it, those operations are done every so often by Firefox itself as necessary.