June 28th, 2011
How much will it leak if you do... nothing at all.
Memory use after 6h idle
After frequently needing to kill FF when it consumes over 2GB of RAM (Iīve seen 3GB and 4GB sometimes) I figured a little test was in order to see just how bad the memory leak problems are in the browser.
As an experiment I left FF running overnight after a fresh start to see just how much memory would be gobbled up when the browser sat there untouched - The resulting task manager captures speak for themselves.
over 300Mb for doing - nothing at all. Thatīs a bit much in anyoneīs book. Itīs sad to see my favorite browser seemingly going down hill as it getīs "enhanced" but there is hope - a new team is supposedly working specifically on the memory leak problems - letīs hope that can cut this down.
Notes:
This is Firefox 5 on a Windows 7 64bit system with core i5 2500K + 16Gb RAM
During the test there were 10 tabs open in panorama but none with anything like flash or video in them.