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I seem to have what used to be called a memory leak and need to restart FF every 45 minutes or so - can I fix it?

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  • Last reply by Roald

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2fter about 2 weeks of closely monitoring 2 PC's with roughly the same specs running the same Facebook game it has become clear that as minutes go by the amount of memory being consumed by Firefox goes up. It starts at about 250 megs and runs up to about 1 gig in ~45 minutes. Both machines are 3 ghz, 3gb machines running 32 bit XP home. (Older P4 CPU's) One of the machines is running DDR2 and the other DDR

When the memory get's to about 750 megs used by FF the entire system bogs down noticeably and gets almost unusable beyond that. Is there something I can do about it or is there a way for me to automate the shut down and restart of FF and have it return to the game?

2fter about 2 weeks of closely monitoring 2 PC's with roughly the same specs running the same Facebook game it has become clear that as minutes go by the amount of memory being consumed by Firefox goes up. It starts at about 250 megs and runs up to about 1 gig in ~45 minutes. Both machines are 3 ghz, 3gb machines running 32 bit XP home. (Older P4 CPU's) One of the machines is running DDR2 and the other DDR When the memory get's to about 750 megs used by FF the entire system bogs down noticeably and gets almost unusable beyond that. Is there something I can do about it or is there a way for me to automate the shut down and restart of FF and have it return to the game?

All Replies (3)

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A tiny suggestion,

I heard that a lot of the time this is caused by extensions and add-ons. Try to disable all of them and see if it is any difference. If its better just enable one extension at the time until you found the problem.

If you cant solve the memory issue, here is a fix that should work making ff restart, if not at a specific memory usage, but on a specific time at least:

Open notepad and write the following:

taskkill /f firefox.exe

Name it FFShutdown.bat and save it

Open a new page of notepad with this line:

start firefox.exe https://support.mozilla.com/

Save that file as FFstart.bat


Now go to windows task scheduler Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks

Browse to your FFShutdown.bat and choose daily and set a time. Do the same for FFStart.bat but set it one minute later.

Repeat this if you want it happen more than once per day.

Hope that helps

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oh sorry I can see you are using XP Home. Think taskkill.exe only works in professional,

Not sure what the program is used in the home edition but im sure someone else know. Or there are numerous programs you can download and install that terminates programs but im pretty much against installing extra apps. If you want it you have to google it "taskkill.exe in XP home".

good luck

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I must be getting old... I completely forgot about .bat files. Haven't touched one since the late '80's

I'll figure out how to kill FF and setup the bat files. Never used the scheduled tasks but that's probably a workable means.

too bad it's a time of day rather than elapsed time...