Archive for November, 2007

22nd Nov 2007

Firefox 3beta1 Memory spike

The issue

There have been a number of reports of Firefox 3 beta 1 consuming high amounts of memory shortly after being run (anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes) and needing to be killed in the task manager, only to happen again next time.

The workaround


The bug has been filed
, and the culprit seems to be the safe browsing list. The first link contains the workaround, which is to simply leave Firefox alone for a while – seems to be 9 minutes according to the two people I’ve heard from – and it will go back to normal, and stay that way.

What’s going on

In a new profile, which is what we recommend you use when testing a beta, Firefox needs to download the safe browsing blacklist. This list is supposed to be downloaded in increments, not all at once. Something’s going wrong and triggering the list to be downloaded all at once. See the second link to follow along (the first link is a dupe of the second link, but contains the workaround).

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