768 mb of ram and a 2 ghz processer is not old, I ran Fedora 7 with 256 mb of ram, and it ran reasonably fast

Well, I guess everyone's experience is a little different. It did have it's points where it worked extremely well, but there were times where it didn't.

I think the OP should seriously consider the beta version of Firefox. It has a much smaller footprint and would benefit him a lot.

Regards,

Brandon

What version of Firefox are you talking about exactly? I have 2.0.0.11 installed. I found something by googling about 1.5 beta but the links were dead so I assumed that's an old, out-of-date version. Can you give me a link to it?

As for RAM, the cost of old RAM for my motherboard is hardly cheaper than RAM for a new motherboard that'll take an Athlon X2 processor, so unless I find some for supercheap, I'm just going to wait and get a new motherboard, RAM and cpu.

He means the Firefox 3 beta

Well i hav lost track of de thread......linux installation to firefox memory signature???

Surprising u had to change so much of ur computer hardware to get linux workin......how old is ur PC really???
I am running Mandriva 2008 on my P4 1.7Ghz 384 MBram,intel 845 GLAD moptherboard with onboard grafix card (PC is abt 5yrs old)without any problem, even with compiz fussion enabled....

Thank you for clarifying for me, Ace. I was at work and suffice it to say... I'm really not there when I'm at work. I believe Firefox is on the second beta release for Firefox 3. A friend of mine runs it at work and it runs very well.

The only problem I saw was in the first beta release. You would click on the address bar to type, it would highlight everything, you would type but nothing would register. This would happen... A LOT. It was shored up in the second release. Mind you, this was in a Windows environment. I'm not a programmer, but I think both the Windows and Linux versions share code. So, this could've been a problem in both?

Fire... sometimes people just don't have that good of luck with Linux and their setup. This is contrary to what I've been saying, but my other computer (what I consider to be old, Athlon XP 2ghz, 768MB ram) ran Ubuntu 7.10 and Fedora 8 better in beginning than my current computer. I changed out some of the hardware in this newer one and now it works (almost) flawless. It takes determination and some aimless poking around sometimes.

Regards,

Brandon

It's hard to say how old it is... I think the motherboard is from either 2003 or 2004... one of the memory sticks may well be from 2000 or 2001. The other is probably from 2004 or 2005. The power supply is new. The video card is from 2002 or 2003.

Hey, I'm posting new threads, but this is the only one anyone's responding to, so I'm staying right here! lol I mean, to me it is the same issue-- slow downs which at first manifested in complete freezes, then freeze-unfreeze-freeze behavior and now is just sloooooooooowing down at times without freezes.

I downloaded Firefox 3 beta 2 and wow, night and day. Much better, even without all my favorite plug-ins, I still like it much better cause it's a lot quicker. I'm still unable to view any Flash videos, however (that's in another thread that no one's posting to).

Wow... I'm getting some interesting blue lines, horizontal and vertical in this text editor... must be Firefox.

LInux has all sorts of surprises. Blue lines are fun, but only the ones I've seen on tables.

I don't think I've seen anyone post this... but is your system up to date? I was having HUGE problems with Fedora and Ubuntu (current version of each) when I first installed. I updated and almost all the problems were gone, and then I revamped the hardware (video card, PSU, new thermal paste on processor). In my limited (compared to some) experience, it's always been a driver issue (either incorrectly handled driver *bluetooth anyone?* or no driver at all)... rarely a hardware issue.

I'm sure you can find flash from the Adobe website. You just have to compile it (.tar.gz). It carries an .rpm for it. Maybe you should've stuck to Fedora (lol). Unless Mandriva supports rpms, but I don't know what it's package manager is. Make sure you have nspluginwrapper installed as well. That helps with flash.

Glad Firefox 3 is working better. I'm considering switching myself. This Firefox that I have is BUGGY. I was in the middle of a download of Yellow Dog Linux for my PS3 and the f*cker crapped out on me (See, you're not alone!). I'll have to start that up again tonight, before I go to sleep.

Regards,

Brandon

actually, you could indeed be experiencing slowdowns due to lack of RAM. I don't know how big a system you run, but I personally usually have more than 512 meg of RAM in use right after booting the system (I run a big system). If your system is doing a lot of swapping, then it will run very slow. After all, the hard drive is always and inevitably the slowest part of the system.

You can test this easily enough by running the vmstat command from the command line. By entering vmstat timeinseconds the command will rerun periodically and will let you know how you are doing. What you are particularly interested is the number of page swaps in and out; this will tell you whether you need more RAM or not.

man vmstat for more information.

Also, there are indeed memory leaks associated with firefox and X. I don't know who gets the blame, but I have documented it though not chased it down to report a bug. Over time, with firefox and X both running, your available memory will dwindle. I have a two gig system and every few days I restart X to clean this problem up.

Thanks for that command Jim. I never knew of that. Nice little tool to have.

Regards,

Brandon

edit: To reiterate what Jim was saying, I left Firefox open for an hour or so and the memory usage was at about 55MB. I closed the process (using System Monitor), reopened and it's already back at 29MB (when I reopened it was at 24). I have 1GB of RAM, so I'm not worried, but you can see where this would become a problem after a while. I've seen it as high as 140MB at one point.

mine never goes above 60 mb, even if I have it open for a day

Well i was nt on de lucky side wid de drivers either.......

Had prob with display, I almost never got my dial up workin in linux (obviously i dont use it anymore), am using a LAN card now (It took me some time to get the drivers......actually it was fun trying so many things!!)
Now havin problems with wireless card.....lol (the saga never ends :-))

By de way mandriva uses rpms. I wont say mandriva de best of all de distros i tried (a lot actually, yet another linux adventure by itself)

And about the system slowing down, if RAM is the problem......try switching to a desktop environment that is less "flashy"....fluxbox???

Firefox does use a lot of memory.....approx 85MB in Win XP for me (de figures for IE are too huge to mention). In linux, however firefox uses a lot less memory.....

Dont worry abt replies in other posts it ll come sooner or later.....

At this point in time, on my system, firefox is claiming 568 Megs (including virtual). X has been up for several days and Firefox has been running all that time. I presently have about a dozen firefox windows open, several with multiple tabs.

Probably within the next day or so I'll restart X.

What's the simplest way to restart X? X is behind KDE, right?