Same problem.

I have the same problem.

It's terrible. Firefox put the download file into memory.

Its impossible to donwload large files without crash the whole system.

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Same problem here on Windows 7 x64 with Firefox 3.6.8.

I open Task Manager and watch Firefox's memory usage.

As soon as I start downloading a 1,8 GB file the memory usage increases proportional to the downloaded MB.

Since I only have 2 GB installed my system soon hangs and Firefox will not respond anymore.

Please fix this soon cause it makes Firefox quite unusable.

This is not really a Firefox issue. It'll happen if you use IE or Google Chrome, or any other browsers. Whenever you download a file on line, your computer has to use your computer's memory and your CPU will increase.

If you are able to complete the download, please read this article to clear the Download History:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_hangs#Hang_downloading_files

You are wrong. The browser is opening temporary file on the harddrive so *it should't* allocate any additional memory (at least no bigger than some small internal file io buffer) during downloading of the big files. I can confirm this looks like some memory leak regression in FF3.6 I remember this was not problem in some older versions(don't remember what exact version started to suck the mem but it could be pre ff3.6) I even tried to reinstall FF from scratch but still have the same problem. WinXP SP3 32bit here.

Someone figured out the culprit is FireBug:

http://beecherbowers.com/2010/08/17/firefox-memory-downloading-large-files/