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Sandro Tosi: My dear iceweasel,:

WTH are you doing with all this memory?

 $ top -b -n 1 | egrep "xulrunner|PID" 
PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND  3907 morph
20   0 2349m 859m  15m S   14 21.7   2013:33 xulrunner-stub 

say goodbye, you're going to die; mew

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Matthew Palmer: Oh Firefox...

What are you doing in that the 1.1GB of resident memory (1357m of virtual memory) you have decided to consume in order to display three web pages? All fairly basic pages -- no flash, no excessive Javascript, and I haven't even done anything particularly exciting in the browser -- just loaded the pages up and let them sit for a few days.

Time to look at Conkeror on the Netbook, I suppose. I'm unlikely to be needing Firebug on there any time soon

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Enrico Zini: Firefox garbage collection:

Some people complained about the insane memory usage of firefox.
It must be a misunderstanding. They probably are not aware of how to trigger the excellent garbage collector shipped with the browser.

Let's navigate heavily a bit, opening several new tabs, click click click around, then closing those tabs:

 $ top -b -n 1 | egrep "firefox|PID"   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM
 TIME+  COMMAND  6842 enrico    20   0  882m 398m  17m S    2 19.9  24:29.55 firefox-bin 

Indeed Firefox memory usage quickly grew. I've seen it grow to a gigabyte and a half after keeping it open for a month.

Now let's trigger the garbage collector:

 $ kill -9 6842 $ # Rerun firefox $ # Click on "Restore previous session"
$ # Wait for the various open tabs to reload 

And voilà! Now Firefox uses much less memory than before:

 $ top -b -n 1 | egrep "firefox|PID"   PID USER
PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND  5242 enrico
  20   0  656m 205m  25m S    0 10.3   0:14.49 firefox-bin 

Labels: firefox, linux