[gentoo-user] firefox is very memory hungry

[Bruno Lustosa]

Just had a look at 'top' here, and was astonished by its output:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
19199 isabel.s  15   0  511m 204m  16m S  0.0 27.2   7:49.58 firefox-bin
19263 isabel.s  16   0  511m 204m  16m S  0.0 27.2   0:00.00 firefox-bin
19264 isabel.s  16   0  511m 204m  16m S  0.0 27.2   0:02.13 firefox-bin
19328 isabel.s  15   0  511m 204m  16m S  0.0 27.2   0:02.47 firefox-bin
22668 lustosa   15   0  129m  97m  17m S  0.0 13.0  11:50.05 firefox-bin
22672 lustosa   16   0  129m  97m  17m S  0.0 13.0   0:00.03 firefox-bin
(...)

The first bunch of firefox is from someone else using my machine as well (wonders of LTSP). I was deeply intrigued on what that user is loading on her firefox, and went to her machine to have a look.
There's nothing special there, though. It's just firefox with 4 tabs open on small and simple pages.
The second bunch of firefox is mine. I have it loaded with like 15 tabs, java applets and so on. I'm also using quite a few extensions.

I can't understand how firefox evolved from small and fast phoenix to this memory hungry beast that has a virtual space of half a gigabyte.
I mean... even IE doesn't seem to eat all this memory. In fact, I have seen very few processes eating that much memory.
Here is what I have:

[ebuild   R   ] www-client/mozilla-firefox-1.0.7-r3  -debug +gnome +ipv6 +java -mozcalendar -mozdevelop -moznoxft -mozsvg +truetype -xinerama -xprint

Can someone shed some light on this?

--
Bruno Lustosa, aka Lofofora          | Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Network Administrator/Web Programmer | ICQ: 1406477
Rio de Janeiro - Brazil              |