Agozer said:
zAlbee said:
I don't think most people actually know what a memory leak is. It's not a memory leak. Firefox decides to keep all this junk in memory because it's available. I highly doubt it's an actual memory leak.
If the memory usage of a process gradually increases to the point when said process takes up all your RAM = Memory leak.
What's "all this junk"?
If Firefox's memory usage goes over 100MB without having a truckload of tabs open simultaneously, you have a problem. On average FF takes around 25-70MB depending on how long it has been running.
Thanks for proving my point.
That's not actually what a memory leak is (although it could certainly be a symptom of a severe one).
A memory leak happens when you create an object on the heap, then delete the reference to that object without releasing the memory that it took up. The memory is still considered to be in use. But at that point, the reference is gone, so there is no way to access or free that area of memory. It won't be freed until the program exits (or with a shittier OS, when the computer is rebooted).
"
To put it another way, a memory leak arises from a particular kind of programming error, and without access to the program code, someone seeing symptoms can only guess that they might be a memory leak. It would be better to use terms such as "constantly increasing memory use" where no such inside knowledge exists."
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_leak#Is_it_a_memory_leak.3F
That said, I can't prove that Firefox doesn't leak either, but all appears to work fine for me. In this session I've deliberately opened ~70 pages simultaneously (210 MB memory), and closing them decreases the memory usage, although not to the original amount; it's hovering around 105 MB usage now (5 tabs), whereas originally it was 86 MB. My guess is that FF keeps additional data cached for quick access. That is acceptable to me.
Also I'm still using 1.0.7 so maybe that's why I don't see the problems some people have.
