Firefox using 100's of mb of ram

Ive noticed that my firefox uses between 100 and 500 mb of ram as soon as it starts up even if there are only 1 or 2 saved tabs
the addons im using are noscript and adblock

are these causing it to use tons of memory? or is there some settings I can use?
I have the cache set to only use 10mb of ram. but it still immideately takes up ~250+ mb of ram as soon as it starts up.

Yup, your addons impact the amount of ram it uses. Cost me 3gigs of ram just to type this. You will have to balance your addons against the amount of resources you have available. I usually run a heavy security addons in my browser for exploring the internet than others tweaked for specific tasks such as video watching and so on and so forth.

OK. Ive also noticed that my firefox often tends to lock up for short periods of time. usually no more than a minute but it can happen constantly where as soon as it starts responding again it locks up.

would the add ons be the cause of this to?

roughly 100 tabs open and 10 addons installed. firefox is butter smooth, extremely responsive, takes around 10% cpu power and uses 600mb. That's completely acceptable.

I bet 5$ that you're using windows. firefox is so much better on linux.

More than likely its your internet connection but yes too many addons and misconfig one will also impact your browser speed cause it to hang.

I've got 4 add-ons on firefox and with 2 tabs open (gmail and redd) I am seeing about 250-260MB or ram usage.

It would seem modern browsers are not as lightweight as they once were.

Having this page and youtube open watching The Tek, ABP and Https Everywhere, I'm using 345mb of ram.

 

It can be addons, but that sounds more like the system is out of memory and has started paging out. If taskmanager shows >85% utilization then a memory upgrade might help.

Firefox on windows does reach a point of no return after it hits the 32-bit memory limit. It's like 15 windows and 10 tabs per window on my computer and firefox will hit a wall and crash.

I only ever have around 8-10 tabs at most open at any one time. and noscript and adblock on and my firefox is slow.

Im also running windows  7 64bit and have 8 gb of ram so I dont know.

 

my firefox is using 1.7 gigs... not counting the plugin container or flash

It's kinda of a shot in the dark but Firefox is single threaded and becomes cpu-bound with lots of tabs. Perhaps if you have your cpu in power saver mode with lots of stuff using cpu power in the background it might consistently stutter. I'd check the resource monitor (task manager->performance->resource monitor) for hard drive, cpu/memory and network usage.

By the way, "slow" in this case means that firefox, itself, as a program, is unresponsive right? If slow means that when it's not on, it takes forever to start up, that's an initial hard disk loading speed thing. If slow means going to google or loading pages takes a very long time, then that's a network usage issue. If it's running the same speed as chrome does, side-by-side, then it's not something inherent of firefox.

PUH-LEASE

Yeah that's what firefox usually looks like left running for a few hours. It will either hit the memory wall and crash or hit a cpu wall. It's essentially using 100% of the cpu resources allocated to it but so long as it can process what it needs to fast enough then it will still be responsive. After a while tho, it will want to use like 200%-500% of it's allocated cpu usage but only get 100% (which is 25% or 1/4 cores in a logical quad core shown above) and become so unresponsive as to finally trigger an app crash. 

Not sure if it would be a good idea to make it dual threaded as that doesn't solve the issue, just prolong the point where it will actually crash.

I want to stress again that this is a windows problem only. I have firefox with hundreds of tabs open for weeks without restarting it.

Yep modern browsers can use silly amounts of ram depending on what you are doing.

i got binders full of ram

If hitting the ram limit in firefox is a problem I suggest you join me and use the 64 bit version of firefox called...........WATERFOX :)

All the joy of firefox but 64bit :)

I switched roughly 18months ago and haven't looked back, all my add-ons work, its great.

Also worth mentioning that it's not always the add-ons that slow down the browser, but the plugins. Adobe Flash can be a big performance culprit.

Short answer? Get more Ram or download and obscure or antiquated browser. All current modern browsers will use similar amounts of RAM to what you are seeing.

I'd also let FF manage it's own RAM cache, as 10 MB means you are slowing down your browsing experience.