A one sentance cannot include enough detail to yeild a helpful answer so I'm going to post this and hope that I can immediately repost without a character limit
Hello and thanks for reading this! I was having trouble with firefox crashing on my old PC (windows xp) when I had 20-30 tabs open (I could be my imagination but if youtube videos were among the opened pages I think it would crash with fewer tabs open). With my old pc I had stored every bookmark on the quickbookmark toolbar and with this many tabs open it would use about 1.6 or 1.7GB of memory and it would consistently crash. I read that the emoticons from each one of those boomarks would add up and become a significant amount of memory. Well, I read this about a week before I knew I was getting a new pc but I went ahead and tried to see if I got better then I deleted them. It did improve but I used the PC for such a short amount of time after that I can't tell you how much. It seemed much better to me.
Now I have a new pc (windows 7) with 32GB of ram and Firefox crashes when it gets around 3GB of memory usage. I have no idea why its using 3GB of memory, its just a lot of tabs about stuff I was reading or researching and decided I didn't want to finish just then. I don't have huge pages of high quality pictures or videos open. I DO keep a lot of tabs open but it will be stuff like forums I was reading, best buy, newegg, reading other people's opinions on products, etc. Other than product images it seems like these pages are simple and would use less memory. To be honest I don't care if it uses more memory I have plenty to waste. I'm not sure why I bought a pc with 32GB of memory, I don't think I've seen the total usage for the pc ever go over 8GB. So I can either try to reduce the amount of memory firefox is using or I can try to make it easier for firefox to use more memory because I have plenty to waste. Either way is ok with me I just want to be able to keep A LOT OF TABS OPEN AT ONCE without it crashing. I love forums and really appreciate you taking the time to read this but some people in forums have a tendency to give an answer that is completely contrary to the original poster's primary objective. I will make any trade off you suggest other than keeping fewer tabs open and readily accessible. That is the entire point. If that is impossible please just say so. I love firefox but if I can't do that I'll probably have to end up trying other browsers and customizing them to be more like firefox.
Thanks again Dan
All Replies (3)
hello dan, sorry that you're having this problem - which addons do you have installed on your system? another thing you could look for: when there's high ram usage, please enter about:compartments into the location bar & have a look at the bottom of the page if there are any "ghost windows" present/listed.
also see Firefox uses too much memory or CPU resources - How to fix
WOW that was a fast reply! I did as you asked and there were no ghost windows listed. I a running firefox 17.0.1 and I have not installed any add-ons.
ok, then there's also about:memory, which can also break down how the memory is currently used by firefox. unfortunately it is highly technical information & i'm personally not very qualified to assess it. but you could post a screenshot of that page nevertheless or paste the contents on a site like http://pastebin.com/ & provide us with a link - maybe someone here on the forum can find what's at the core of the issue then...