Frank Cox wrote: > I tend to leave Firefox running for days at a time. After a few days of > uptime, when I click on a link it will open a new window (called "untitled > window" according to the task bar) and load the web page into that. The > "untitled window" doesn't have the top menu items (forward, back, location bar, > what-have-you), it just shows the actual web page that I clicked on. If I go > back (right-click, select "back" as there is no menu), "untitled window" > disappears and I'm back to the usual Firefox screen with the menu items and so > on, but when I click on any link from there it puts me back into "untitled > window". If I go back two screens, then I still get put into "untitled window" > when I click a new link, or even the one that I just came from. > > If I close "untitled window", Firefox closes. I can then reload it and > everything works for another several days or a week until it happens again. > > I have had this going on through several Firefox revisions on FC6. > > Any idea why? > Firefox is a resource pig. It doesn't like to (want to?) return memory it has allocated to the free memory pool for fear that it will be needed again sometime soon. (AFAIK, this is a conscious decision by the Mozilla DEV team.) As such, you can watch its memory footprint grow, and grow, and grow. Along with it, the memory foot print for Xorg grows as well (though not as quickly). The only way to get (most of) those resources back is to exit entirely from firefox and restart it (you can get the rest of them back by restarting Xorg...). I used to leave firefox running all the time as well, and I have seen its footprint grow from 100M to over 2G of my VM. Given that I have 1.5GB or RAM, and about 2.5GB of swap space, I find that a *lot* of my running apps end up on the swap partitions and need to be swapped back in (which if firefox is *big* enough, can take quite a while). I have also added the firefox memory leak detection extension, and I am *amazed* at the number of site which leak memory when they are closed (which I'm sure lends to firefox's growing footprint), including a few chrome:// things as well! I won't get into Linux's poor speed at swapping, even to multiple swap partitions on different disks on different controllers, which is a topic for another thread at a time when I have detailed information to spout then. -- Kevin J. Cummings kjchome@xxxxxxx cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)
