Firefox and YOUR ram usage.

[Koing]

I have 5 firefox windows with 15 'tabs'.

My firefox is using 178mb of ram. It has gone up to 288mb

I have 512mb and I have about 70-110 to at times 5mb left

My pc has been for 7 days.

So what ram usage do you get in FF?

Koing

 

[MikeMike]

i was at 128K once, but that starts to hit my computer with powerpoint, word, dc++ running, gaim, kerio, nav, dreamweaver and other things open.

MIKE

 

[carldon]

I opened about 30 tabs, but the usuage is about 125 MB.

CD.

 

[Koing]

Hmmmmmmmm.....must be the gallery stuff I was looking at making the memory usage so high? But those windows are closed now.

I think I'll close down all my FF windows and see what the memory usage is then. I should have more then 50mb free!

I have other stuff on but it is taking up less then 100Mb of ram though.

Koing

 

[igowerf]

31MB for two windows maximized. When I minimize, it goes down to 1.9mb.

There have been a lot of threads discussing this already. I think Firefox caches webpages in both your RAM and disk. Type about:cache in your location bar and it will give you some information about the cache sizes.

Anyway, when you're running a game, don't you want it to use all the RAM it can get for the best performance? What's so different about using a browser?

 

[BlueWeasel]

I'm not at home right now, but IIRC a single instance of FF with 3-4 tabs open uses about 25-35mb.

 

[drag]

Firefox caches webpages in RAM. The more memory you have aviable the larger the portion of the total ram firefox will allow to be used. So don't be to alarmed about the ram usage, it's being put to good use. If you don't like it you can reduce or eliminate the amount of ram firefox can use for cache and go with a harddrive-only cache.

In your browser you can see cache statistics for. In the url bar type:
about:cache

Here is what mine says:

Memory cache device

Number of entries: 906
Maximum storage size: 17408 KiB
Storage in use: 17220 KiB
Inactive storage: 11730 KiB

List Cache Entries
Disk cache device

Number of entries: 4655
Maximum storage size: 50000 KiB
Storage in use: 28074 KiB
Cache Directory: /home/drag/.mozilla/firefox/6wixomnv.default/Cache

List Cache Entries

I have 368 or so megs of RAM aviable (as reported by my system, I am using my laptop and some of the RAM is reserved for the video card). Out of that 364 megs is being used.

So that leaves only about 3-4 megs of wasted and unused RAM, so my system is fairly efficient. (not using disk cache, so I know I have plenty of RAM aviable for what I am doing.)

Out of that gnome-desktop-monitor reads that my firefox browser is using 145 or so megs of RAM. However the actual executable is using only 58.6 megs as reported thru the "top' command.

Of course if your using Windows the various reporting tools will have different definitions of what is "used" ram.

edit:
If you want to change the caching behavior of Firefox advanced configuration is aviable if you type:
about:config
in your URL bar.

 

[DnetMHZ]

20MB with just this thread open

 

[Koing]

Thanks about the tip.

I did a search on firefox and memory but nothing came up.

Well I log off and back on as the same user and I have 356mb of ram left now w00t

I think it was just due to log off and on again.

Well nothing is different about the browser. Just that nothing like this happpened in IE and I was browsing with a lot of pages also. Just the first time my ram usage went up and i was left with 50mb or down to 5mb and playing a video would take longer and lag at times.

Koing

 

[LeetViet]

44,244KB with 2 Firefox open

 

[kamper]

With all these threads about how much memory firefox uses I wonder which numbers people report. The windows task manager gives you both "Mem Usage" and "VM Size" which are somewhat different things. You'll notice that when you minimize firefox and it cuts its memory usage way down the VM Size doesn't go down, but it's the VM number that counts towards the total PF Usage you see on the graph. I suppose we could have a discussion on which number you should report but for now I'm just curious, which number are you guys reporting?

 

[Koing]

Originally posted by: drag
Firefox caches webpages in RAM. The more memory you have aviable the larger the portion of the total ram firefox will allow to be used. So don't be to alarmed about the ram usage, it's being put to good use. If you don't like it you can reduce or eliminate the amount of ram firefox can use for cache and go with a harddrive-only cache.

In your browser you can see cache statistics for. In the url bar type:
about:cache

Here is what mine says:

Memory cache device

Number of entries: 906
Maximum storage size: 17408 KiB
Storage in use: 17220 KiB
Inactive storage: 11730 KiB

List Cache Entries
Disk cache device

Number of entries: 4655
Maximum storage size: 50000 KiB
Storage in use: 28074 KiB
Cache Directory: /home/drag/.mozilla/firefox/6wixomnv.default/Cache

List Cache Entries

I have 368 or so megs of RAM aviable (as reported by my system, I am using my laptop and some of the RAM is reserved for the video card). Out of that 364 megs is being used.

So that leaves only about 3-4 megs of wasted and unused RAM, so my system is fairly efficient. (not using disk cache, so I know I have plenty of RAM aviable for what I am doing.)

Out of that gnome-desktop-monitor reads that my firefox browser is using 145 or so megs of RAM. However the actual executable is using only 58.6 megs as reported thru the "top' command.

Of course if your using Windows the various reporting tools will have different definitions of what is "used" ram.

edit:
If you want to change the caching behavior of Firefox advanced configuration is aviable if you type:
about:config
in your URL bar.

I see dude.

Thanks a lot

Koing

 

[xcript]

Currently, 23,524KB with 1 window/3 tabs.

24,676KB for the single IE window I have open.

 

[Koing]

Anyway to change the amount of Ram FF uses?

I use the:

about:config

Then I filter it using "cache" as the filder word. Then now I get the cache on my disk and that is fine. Anyway to limit FF to use less ram?

Thanks

Koing

 

[Nothinman]

Galeon with 12 tabs open : 88M

 

[Koing]

ttt

to know a way to limiti ram cache size for FF

Koing

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Koing
ttt

to know a way to limiti ram cache size for FF

Koing

I don't remember. I looked for it, but I couldn't find it.

It does it dynamicly, though, I beleive. I don't remember the specifics, but I think that it will reduce memory usage automaticly depending on what else is using up RAM. So if you need it for a game or something you shouldn't have any performance penalty from having firefox run with memory cache enabled vs having firefox with memory cache disabled.

 

[drag]

I found it. here.

Also before messing around with it to much check out this faq on memory cache

 

[0roo0roo]

153mb 25 tabs over 4 windows. can't believe i counted bleh. it gets worse then that often. no biggie, gots 1gb ram what its there for.

 

[ugh]

When determining the amount of mem an app uses, do you guys take into account both the Mem Usage and VM Size columns in Task Manager?

 

[Nothinman]

When determining the amount of mem an app uses, do you guys take into account both the Mem Usage and VM Size columns in Task Manager?

You shouldn't, because VM usage doesn't indicate physical memory usage or even pagefile usage.

 

[ugh]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

When determining the amount of mem an app uses, do you guys take into account both the Mem Usage and VM Size columns in Task Manager?

You shouldn't, because VM usage doesn't indicate physical memory usage or even pagefile usage.

But isn't VM usage similar to pagefile usage?

 

[Nothinman]

But isn't VM usage similar to pagefile usage?

No. The problem is that MS misuses the term all over their UI and it gives a false impression about that being true. The short answer is : VM usage is just address usage, there's no correlation to physical memory or pagefile usage.

The long answer is : Virtual Memory has been discussed on this forum many times, I've probably written what it is at least a half dozen. Basically Virtual Memory is, as the name suggests, nothing more than the virutalization of memory addresses. Each process has a set VM space of 4G, 2G worth of those addresses are reserved by the Windows kernel and 2G are available to the process. Since most people don't have 4G of physical memory available those 4G worth of addresses are mapped to different real physical addresses by the OS with asstance from a hardware MMU, sometimes the VM address points to something that's shared like a library or shared memory mapping, sometimes it points to private data and sometimes it points to nothing. When it points to nothing this causes a page fault and causes the OS to either figure out what the process wanted and page it in from disk or kill the process for attempting to access invalid memory. In the common case of paging the data in from disk, it could be on a normal file like the executable itself or in the pagefile or any other place the OS could be setup to page in from.

Everything causes VM usage, running an app causes VM to be used because the process needs a new VM for it's instance, it needs addresses for the executable, it needs addresses for any libararies it requires whether they're in memory already or not, it needs addresses for any misc mmap()'d files that process uses, etc. It would be trivially easy to write an app that would startup, use 2G of VM and do absolutely nothing.

 

[BW86]

25 tabs open - 35mb

 

[JBT]

Mine runs at ~ 35MB I have a GB of ram. I could really give a crap though. If it used 100MB or so that would be fine if it improved the performance.