Am I experiencing a memory leak, or just high memory usage in Firefox?

Question

I'm loading some fairly big data sets in to firefox (500 k or so) and drawing tables with them. Firefox is using up to 400 megs of memory. How can I tell if Firefox is leaking memory, or is just using a lot of memory just because it can?

Is there another browser which will use less memory if it doesn't need it? I get the feeling that firefox grabs a bunch of memory for itself and doesn't release it unless it has to. It may be apparent that my understanding of memory management in general is very superficial.

Answer 1

There is a setting you can set in firefox that forces it to free as much memory as it can on minimise:

1. On the website url toolbar type about:config
2. A page full of words will come up. right click anywhere and choose New -> Boolean
3. For the name input type "config.trim_on_minimize" Select True
4. Restart FireFox.

Answer 2

If it is leaking memory, then the mem usage (number of K) in your Windows task manager will continue to grow. If this number is fairly consistent, then Firefox is behaving normally. It is my opinion that Firefox requires far too much memory to behave normally.

Answer 3

How can I tell if Firefox is leaking memory, or is just using a lot of memory just because it can?

Open another page in a different tab. Then close your 'big' tab and see if the memory is freed.