firefox and GB?

Question

firefox and GB?

well, kind of a long story, I will try to make it shorter

I have kind of switched around with internet browsers I think 3 or 4 times now, while I was with google chrome and playing minecraft, things would get laggy, I found out that chrome and minecraft don't like eachother ( which is when I think I started getting a bit worried about the ram/GB/whatever that is called ) so I switched to firefox, and then after using that for a while I switched to opera for a few reasons ( some problems that I fixed by now )

Is it normal that the GBs start going down when I use firefox? right now it is at 3.84, nothing really seems to be going on with my computer and everything is rather smooth, but the GBs go down slowly over time, I restart firefox to bring it back up to somewhere like 4:30 or maybe a bit higher ( when firefox isn't on it is 5:18 or 5:30 or in between there )

I have firefox ( which has 6 tabs open ) skype, activity monitor, and paint tool SAI on, am I just paranoid about this? I wanna know how much GB is normal for imacs

and also I had to change from safari because safari seemed to start giving me problems and I'm not sure I like safari anymore

OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

Posted on Apr 1, 2015 4:36 PM

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Answer 1

Rudegar

Level 10

170,748 points

Apr 1, 2015 5:00 PM in response to electrical-dragon

when you say GB what do you mean?

GB is mostly used in terms of giga bytes which is a term used to measure system memory or storage

so do you experience memory leak with firefox using more and more of your system memory or are you worried about how much storage firefox take up on your harddiks ?

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Answer 2

Apr 1, 2015 5:03 PM in response to Rudegar

well in the activity monitor under system memory, there is a spot that says free, that is what I'm talking about, I'm not sure what you mean by memory leaks

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Answer 3

Apr 1, 2015 5:12 PM in response to electrical-dragon

That is the amount of RAM or memory in your Mac that it free. What you are talking about sound perfectly normal.

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Answer 4

Apr 1, 2015 5:15 PM in response to Allan Eckert

at times I see it gets low to 3.67 or something like that, maybe I just keep it too high or open activity monitor too much?

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Answer 5

Apr 8, 2015 5:56 PM in response to electrical-dragon

I'm sorry for randomly bumping this up but do you think I should try this about:memory thing I heard about?

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Answer 6

babowa

Level 9

78,103 points

Apr 8, 2015 5:59 PM in response to electrical-dragon

Your RAM usage changes dynamically with every small or large thing you do - that is how it is supposed to work and Mac OS is quite good at using RAM; some apps require more than others. Unless you see a lot of page outs (at the bottom of the memory info), there is absolutely nothing wrong.

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Answer 7

Apr 8, 2015 6:07 PM in response to babowa

thank you, it might just be me being such a worry wart, I don't see any page outs right now, it is 0

but are you sure nothing is wrong? I'm not sure about this, but I think I heard that firefox has a bug that causes memory leaks, is that true?

long story shortened, yesterday I was recording with OBS on minecraft ( I also had firefox, skype, and maybe SAI open ) and I had to stop because it was getting late, when I checked activity monitor, it was down to I think 2.90 or somewhere around there, I forgot but I tried not to worry about that and went to bed, in the morning before school, I checked again, it was all the way up to 4.30 or around there again, the ram seems to jump around or something

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Answer 8

babowa

Level 9

78,103 points

Apr 8, 2015 6:16 PM in response to electrical-dragon

What OS are you on?

The way the OS works with RAM was radically changed in Yosemite and you will see there that it uses ALL the RAM all/most of the time. That is how it is designed to work = as the saying goes: unused RAM is wasted RAM. So, if you are running an older OS, you will have available RAM whereas with Yosemite, there won't be that much of it - as long as things work well, there are no problems.

If you had a memory leak, you'd have symptoms. Do a search here for memory leaks - the posts I've seen were all about Safari, not Firefox.

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Answer 9

Apr 8, 2015 6:19 PM in response to babowa

mountain lion, I heard that yosemite likes taking ram, and also I am rather nervous about getting yosemite, what are some symptoms of memory leaks?

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Answer 10

babowa

Level 9

78,103 points

Apr 8, 2015 6:26 PM in response to electrical-dragon

I've not had any, so I can't relate any - do a search here

https://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?facet=content&type=discussion&sort=rel evanceDesc&showAnsweredFirst=true&q=memory%20leak

Unless you are experiencing unusual symptoms (kernel panics, freezes, other unexplained behavior), I wouldn't worry about it.

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Answer 11

Apr 8, 2015 6:31 PM in response to babowa

my mac never freezes, it has gone really laggy before and I think it was because of genio which I have gotten rid of by now, but I think I just had several bad experiences with stuff like viruses or other bad things on computers I have had before

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