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Well documented “memory leak” huh? I have Firefox 3.6.3 that I leave up and running for days at a time with no leaks, so how about a link to that “well documented memory leak”?

I can’t point to any documentation but I can definitely say it happens to me. My FF starts out (with 10-12 saved tabs) with a working set of about 150MB. Within a few days it’s 500MB or more.

That might help the specific Adobe Reader problem, though I need some features in Adobe.

But it’s a general problem with many apps. Foxit Reader wouldn’t help that. I need to figure out the root cause.

Bob, that sounds like a likely match. Maybe FF4 will resolve this problem.

How do I increase the Flash buffer cache? I went to the settings dialog at the Adobe site and I see controls for how much storage a website can use &etc, but nothing for the buffer cache.

I use FF 3.6.3 and have quite a number of extensions installed, and use lots of tabs (have 35 open now), and leave FF running for a day or two or longer. … In my experience, FF used to have memory problems (memory consumption would grow and grown until FF crashed), but I haven’t had that problem for quite some time now. I traced the root cause of my memory problems back to extensions. Have you tried disabling all your extensions and then reenabling them one at a time while seeing how FF behaved?

Yes, I have. For months now I’ve only been running with Roboform and a few others — Java console, Adobe DLM, Tab Mix Plus, I think that was it. I just disabled everything except Roboform and Java, but I’ve done this before and it didn’t help. I’ve even disabled ALL add-ons, including Roboform (the Roboform toolbar was still there) and that didn’t help either. I hope this isn’t caused by Roboform. Maybe I should try completely uninstalling Roboform and see if that makes any difference. Except I don’t know my passwords.

It’s encouraging to hear that FF **CAN** run without eating up RAM and without the hangs, even with 35 tabs! (You’ve got me beat, I’m impressed!! ) But I’ve disabled just about everything and it’s not helping. I don’t know what else to try.

Also, another thing to thing to check – since the spike is so regular – are any of your tabs set to Reload every xx seconds??

Don’t think so, though I do usually have a finance.google.com stock chart open. But the spike is NOT normal behavior. It was just something unusual and noteworthy when I posted about it.

Again, I would look toward the extensions that you are using. I have the SQLite Optimizer extension installed, and it runs a cleanup on the FF database on exit. It doesn’t take 40 seconds on my system, it’s more like 20-25 seconds.

It literally takes 45-60 seconds or more for the firefox.exe process to exit, assuming it’s been running long enough to build up to 400-600MB of working set. I don’t know what’s eating up the memory, and I don’t know what’s running to gradually free the memory. Anybody know if there’s some way to find out??

Gary

Probably related: it doesn’t usually do this, but today I noticed that Firefox was in some kind of periodic CPU-eating cycle. Every 20-22 seconds or so it spiked one CPU to near 100%, then returned to its normal low CPU usage. The brief lock-ups seemed to correspond with these CPU spikes. Which would make perfect sense, if something is spiking the CPU every 20 seconds — except it doesn’t usually show the spiking behavior (I’m 99.99% sure) but it *always* eventually does the lockups.

I generally run with at least 10-12 tabs open and I often leave FF up for days at a time. I’ve noticed that FF’s memory usage grows over time — it’s got a 675MB working set right now — and if I stop and restart it, the memory starts out at a reasonable level again. I think it also reduces the lockups for a while but I have a less-clear correlation on that.

It takes 40 seconds or more for firefox.exe to actually exit after I kill Firefox. As soon as I killed FF, the CPU spikes stopped in the CPU they’d been in. Some other spikes started in the other core, but not as regular. By the time firefox.exe fully exited, the spikes seemed to be gone from both cores.

When I started FF up again, the spikes were gone. So were the lockups. For now.

So something weird is up, but I sure can’t tell what it is…

4GB. 32bit. Sometimes I load it pretty heavily — e.g. with VMware running several OSs — but it does this even with just 8-10 apps running and < 2GB "physical memory in use" according to Task Manager.

Do you mean Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Network tab -> Offline storage? That’s the only cache adjustment I know of. I’ve raised it from 50MB to 200MB as a test.

But I doubt that’s it, unless FF is in the habit of pruning its cache every 30 seconds or so. The hanging can happen that frequently, even when I’m doing something as non-intensive as typing this response.

We’ve tried the low-budget NAS approach on our small home-office network, unsuccessfully. Two NASs from WD and three from LaCie all crapped out in 1-8 months. The WD NASs at least were recoverable, as it was just the enclosure’s LAN/USB interface that died. I opened it up, popped the disk into another computer, and copied off the data. The LaCies, however, were 1TB NASs with 2 500GB drives RAIDed together. When that died, there was no way to recover the data without another RAID controller. Painful.

Is there a **RELIABLE** NAS solution that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars?? If these throwaway NASs are the only affordable option, maybe the thing to do is to use one of them for active access, and back it up nightly to another one. That way you should only lose one or the other.

I realize this forum is for users running Windows, but if you were to take the second hand smoke analogy to the logical conclusion, then the answer is to ban machines running Windows software from the internet.

Bingo. Taking Microsoft’s “second-hand smoke” analogy a step further: Microsoft are the tobacco peddlers. They’re the ones who addicted millions of people to this unhealthy software. THEY are the ones who should pay to solve the problem, NOT the taxpayers as MS are suggesting.

Or using the “keep your car in good repair to drive on the roads” analogy: if a car maker produces inherently unsafe cars, they are punished and required to recall and repair those cars at THEIR expense. The same should be true for the OS manufacturer who created the entire Internet security problem.

Since Microsoft seems unable to produce proper secure software, their systems should be quarantined until such time that they can become law-abiding members of the community. Microsoft should be fined heavily for causing this problem, which costs billions of dollars every year, and required to repair the problem as a condition of selling their product.

Force the perpetrators to fix the problems **they caused**, or future perpetrators will just repeat the same offenses.