Firefox is getting ridiculous, every new version seems to be consuming more and more memory. The other day after leaving it on for 4-5 days, with multiple tabs open, it became really unresponsive, so I decided to see how much time it would take to close evrythng properly, I did a "quit" in firefox.
It took nearly 10 minutes for it to exit (thrashing all the time in between).
Last year I could leave it on for at least a week, now its more like 4 days, then top indicates it has 55% mem usage, and things start thrashing really bad.
Any solution to this ?
I have 512MB ram. 1GB swap.

Hasn't Firefox had this problem for a while now?

Yes, and it seems to be getting worse with each new release

Check if theres some bug or something in firefox (visit their webpage or search firefox xxx (ur version) flaws bugs problems in google
I havebeen using firefox for around 2-3 years in linux and windows and i dont experience such a problem in it....

I belive there is a memory leak in Firefox they have yet to Fix. You can set the browsers cache memory by following steps, this should get mozillla back to normal.

Start firefox. In location bar type about:config

Right click select New>Integer. Copy and past this into the box that appears: browser.cache.memory.capacity

Click OK

Another box will pop up here you enter the the amount or memory you want to allocate for firefox. This depends on how much RAM your computer has, but generally you don't want to allocate too little (under 8MB), but if you allocate too much, you might as well not do this. A good recommended setting is 16MB. If you want 16MB, enter this value into the dialog prompt:

16384

(Why 16384 instead of 16000? Because computers use base-12 counting. Thus 16 megabytes = 16384 bytes. Likewise, if you want to double that and allocate 32MB, you'd enter 32768.)

Restart Firefox, and check your vmsize It should fix your problem, if it doesnt play around with the memory size until its good to go. You can find information all over the internet about tweaking firefox.

Hope this helps you out

Reducing memory usage (Firefox) - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_m..._%28Firefox%29

Thanks guys, I made some changes: I set
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 3 (changed from 5)
browser.sessionhistory.max_entries to 30 (changed form 50, what does this field do )
browser.cache.memory.capacity to 14000 (dunno what it was)

And now firefox has been on for 12 hrs, multiple tabs, and memory consumption is only 19% according to top Before the changes, memory would have hit 33% by now.

Harddrake2 is hanging up on my system - perhaps that may be why firefox was using so much memory ? If it could not query the system for the memory installed, perhaps it was assuming more memory installed that actually was ?

Heres another bigass thread on this issue:
http://developers.slashdot.org/artic.../02/14/2154224

Another link:
http://techpatterns.com/forums/about623.html