Firebird is leaking

Posted on June 17, 2003 @ 14:35 in Software

I've been using Mozilla Firebird as my primary browser for a while now and I think it's a pretty darn good browser already. My only complaint is that I think it's got a memory leak. I have Firebird installed with only one plugin, the Tabbrowser Extensions, but after a morning of fairly intensive use, it was eating up more than 90MB of memory. This seriously hampers performance of my work pc with only 128MB of ram. Closing down Firebird and starting it up again with the same set of open windows showed memory use of around 20MB. Quite a difference.

Update: Hmm... took me less than an hour to have Firebird suck up over 150MB of memory, so much actually, that Windows complained that it was running out of memory. Closing individual tabs doesn't free up any extra memory, only closing Firebird completely frees up the memory. I'm running Firebird on Win2k.

Comments and Trackbacks

  1. Try minimizing it every so often: my sloppy organization means that I need to get to my Desktop quite often (since that's where I keep everything), so I end up hitting (Windows key)-M pretty often. I just left Firebird going with a bunch of tabs open for quite a while, built it up to something like 38MB, minimized then maximized, and it dropped to 19MB.

    Posted by Phil Ringnalda on June 17, 2003 @ 17:41

  2. I'll give it a try. It really only bothers me at work, where I have only 128MB of ram. At home I have 384MB of ram and although Firebird eats up a good chunk of that, it's never been much of a problem.

    Posted by Frank on June 17, 2003 @ 19:15

  3. Well, I've been keeping an eye on Firebird today.

    The amount of ram I mentioned yesterday, is the amount that is occupied and freed up from the total of "MEM Usage" in the Performance tab of the Windows Task Manager.

    There is a rather large discrepancy between the amount of ram that the Firebird proces says it's using in the Processes tab of the Windows Task Manager (which was about 23MB just now) and the amount of memory freed up when closing down Firebird (namely over 60MB).

    I've been observing that while the amount reported in the Processes tab only grows a little over time, the 'invisible' memory usage grows quite considerably.

    Minimizing the window appears to have no effect for me.

    I have enlarged the amount of disk based cache for Firebird from 2MB to 20MB. That might have something to do with it... I had it turned down low, because who needs 50MB of cached webstuff on their disk?

    Posted by Frank on June 18, 2003 @ 13:36

  4. My mozilla firebird works fine except for a huge memory problem with this page: www.ncsu.edu/stud_orgs/soc_dance/dance.html on that page all of a sudden it starts swallowing memory and will keep eating memory until you shut it down.

    Posted by Steve Story on June 23, 2003 @ 20:35

  5. Increasing the amount of cache available to Firebird appears to help... some. The slowdown of the system is not so pronounced anymore, but Firebird continues to gobble up a lot of memory.

    Posted by Frank on June 25, 2003 @ 14:30

  6. Are you using 0.6, or a nightly? There was a Moz bug (that I really didn't understand) causing leaks from typeaheadfind, that's fixed in the nightlies. As long as you can live with an odd bug where right-clicking in a bookmark folder makes it fairly inaccessible (dragging another bookmark back and forth over the stubborn folder seems to bring it back after a while), 20030628 seems to be working pretty well for me.

    Posted by Phil Ringnalda on June 30, 2003 @ 04:42

Post a comment

Comments and trackbacks have been closed on this site. My apologies.

Since MT-Blacklist inexplicably stopped working I had no other recourse than close comments and trackbacks to stop the spam. I've been meaning to correct this for quite a while, but life got in the way... in a good way I should add.