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Firefox Memory Leak is a Feature

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the that's-what-they-all-say dept.

SenseOfHumor writes "The Firefox memory leak is not a bug. It's a feature! The 'feature' is how the pages are cached in a tabbed environment." From the article: "To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox's memory usage can climb dramatically. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web."

3 of 602 comments (clear)

  1. Total cached page limit. by Short+Circuit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So there's a way to limit the number of cached pages per tab, but no way to limit the total number of cached pages, for those of us who have fifteen tabs open?

    Whoops!

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  2. What I'd like Mozilla devs to do by A+beautiful+mind · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Let them release 2.0, but then try to focus on:
    • fixing the practically fixable bugs (not the design decisions)
    • making code performance improvements (faster, with less memory!)
    • security auditing
    ...for a half year or a year. I don't need new features, I'm currently happy with the ones I have and I'd prefer the current features working securely, in a speedy fashion and mostly without bugs. This time period would also give enough time for extensions to mature more.

    Before someone jumps at my throat, it's just a description what I'd like to see, but of course its all up to the developers, they decide what to code and do with their time. It is just simple user feedback.
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  3. Firefox developers don't "get it" by Vellmont · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Memory isn't an unlimited resource you just hoard whenever you think you need it. Right now my instance of firefox is taking up 128 megs! I've seen it up to 256 megs before. This is just simply insane. I've seen people who's computer performance has gone down the tubes because firefox is taking up all the memory (and these are machines with 512 megs of memory, not exactly tiny). What I'd like to convey to the firefox devs is this: Your application isn't the only one running on the system. Play nice and don't be a hog.

    With the number of people complaining about this (and the number of people that don't even KNOW to complain) isn't it a safe bet that you've made a mistake in the amount of cached pages?

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