Thursday, October 16, 2014

Review: FireFox's Memory Usage

I've been kind of watching the memory usage of FireFox using the Windows Task Manager. I was curious how much it used because I had left my gmail test account open last night and this morning FireFox was up to 1G of memory. So, I was wondering how much it uses by default.

The odd thing was that it settles around 74M of RAM after startup. Then I minimized it for a few minutes. When I check the WTM, it is now at 150M. When I bring it back to maximized, this actually drops down to 76M of RAM. I tried this minimized/maximize one more time and got 150M dropping down to 100M. It has not dropped below 99M as I am typing this blog on Chrome.

Even if I leave FireFox maximized but in the background, the memory usage remains the same. This seems very odd because I thought that inactive windows would actually take up the same or less RAM. It could take up less RAM due to its inactivity status which would the OS should start moving some of it to the harddisk so that it has more RAM for active applications.

Not as pertinent to FireFox, I always find it odd that the memory usage would fluctuate when nothing is happening with the application.

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