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FireFox Bug running Google Docs?

2 points by gibsonf1 ↗ HN
I've noticed a disturbing pattern when running Google Docs on FireFox. I typically run 2 separate gdoc gmail account tabs and 2 separate calendar tabs as well as other tabs for my web app etc. What consistently happens is that FF uses increasing amounts of memory. By the time it hits 1gig of memory used, the response time is amazingly slow.

As an experiment, I tried running just the gmail and calendar on IE, and was shocked not to find a similar problem. Is there some kind of javascript bug running on Firefox? Or could this be related to Firebug and Yslow running on the browser at the same time? Anyone have a similar problem?

3 comments

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codeslinger
+1. All of Google's AJAX apps start blowing up the VSZ/RSS of the process when I leave them open for even a medium amount of time (i.e. longer than 15 minutes). This is using Firefox on Mac OS X. Most of the Google AJAX apps are not supported in Safari as yet, so I can't really compare and contrast ;-) I can't say that FF is great on RAM to begin with, however, but this could be b/c I always have at least 3 tabs going, sometimes up to 30.
dwisehart
I have seen the same thing. Typically I have half a dozen doc tabs open and sometimes I have a calendar tab open but not too often.

What I really hate is when I have 10 tabs open and I have to restart FireFox because it is over 1 GB of virtual memory: I don't want to have to reopen all of the tabs again. So I use Process Explorer to kill off FireFox. When I restart it, FireFox gives me the chance to restore my last session, which I do. FireFox is then back running again with all of the tabs that were there when I killed it and memory usage is down to a fraction of what it was before.

akkartik
That's one way to do it. You could also set Tools/options/main/startup/When-firefox-starts