Thursday, April 5, 2018

Does your Firefox have a memory leak?

Mine does.  I'm running V52.7.3  Firefox on Win XP.  Start up Firefox and check Task Manager, and Firefox will be using 168K of RAM.  Let it run for a while, visit some websites, do whatever, and notice that it starts running slower.  Takes longer to open a new site, to switch from tab to tab.  Check Task Manager and find Firefox is using 500K and more of RAM. 
   Something like Firefox which needs large and unpredictable amounts of RAM, is built to acquire the needed RAM from Windows, making system calls to get it.  And when finished, Firefox is supposed to return the borrowed RAM to Windows.  Common coding error, program forgets to return no longer needed RAM.  This is called a memory leak.  I think Firefox has one.  At least in the 32 bit XP version.  I have a newer computer running Win10 that doesn't seem to have the problem. 

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