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Sunday, 11 October 2015 10:22

Fixing Firefox Memory Leaks

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Most performance issues are caused by memory leaks and these are usualy caused by extensions or add-ons. I will outline how to try and find out what extensions or plugin is causing the rising memory usage. Once you have read this article you will find this process a lot easier rahter than taking a stab in the dark.  These instructions more than a fix help you idetify the cause of the problem which is fixed by removing (disabling might work) the offending extension or add-on.

Usual culprits

There are a few addons and extensions that are usual causes of slow performance or memory leaks so i will list them here

Add-ons

  • All ad-blocking plugins, uBlock, uBlock Origin, AdBlock, AdBlock Plus etc...
  • No-Script
  • Firebug
  • LastPass
  • Web-Developer Toolbar

Extensions

  • Flash

Others Culprits

Any add-on or extension that does a look-up per page will slow things down especially if the remote server they are querying is slow or un-responsive.

What can I do?

Disable the usual culprits

This is an easy method, just disable all of the usual culprits and see if things improve.

Disable Add-ons 1 by 1

The usual advice is to diable you add-ons 1 by 1 and see which is causing the perfromance hot or massive use of memory. This will work but can take many hours of disabling a single plugin and then using Firefox to see if it runs correctly.

You could conversly disable all add-ons and then enable them 1 by 1, see if Firefox runs correctly and then move on to the next addons.

This method can take forever because you need to make sure that Firefox is running correctly and you need to do this for above 30minutes to make sure there are no issues.

Analyse the Memory usage / Use Addons to find the culprit

This is my prefered method. Use the following methods and tools to analyse what is actually using memory.

Addons

To see what is using the ram you can install add-ons listed below, which will give you data for each tab you are using and/or you can view per add-ons ram usage. After installing these addons use firefox for a while until it slows down and then have alook at the tab information to see if there are any obvious candidates and then you can move on to seeing which addon is using the ram. Once you find a candidate, disable it, restart Firefox and continue using to see if the performance issue is fixed

In-Built to Firefox

Only experts can use the infromation here to identify what is using all of the ram, and those people will know how to use this. I dont know hwo to use this information so anything i say would just be guessing.

  • about:memory - if you go to this page you will see some raw data about memory usage (expert only)

Links

Read 1248 times Last modified on Sunday, 11 October 2015 12:17
Published in Firefox
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