Is there a way to determine how much memory each Firefox add-on is leaking?

Is there a way to determine how much memory each Firefox add-on is leaking?

I found a similar thread on SU here but it is several years old and pretty much all of the add-ons mentioned are no longer in development.

I use Firefox as my primary browser and within a day or two the memory usage is over a gigabyte which is a bit ridiculous.

I don't have a ton of add-ons (in my opinion) but the list of what I use is below:

  • AdBlock Plus
  • Autopager
  • Download Statusbar
  • DownloadHelper
  • Greasemonkey
  • IE Tab 2
  • ImageZoom
  • LastPass
  • Restart Firefox
  • StumbleUpon
  • TreeStyle Tab (can't live without this one and is the only thing keeping me from switching to Chrome)

From what I've read AdBlock Plus leaks a lot of memory but it makes life on the web so much more enjoyable that I'd really prefer to keep it.

I'm running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit.


Solution 1:

There's been some work towards making about:memory report more information, but as of yet, it doesn't give anything particularly helpful for diagnosing addon memory usage.

That leaves us the various leak testing tools at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance:Leak_Tools

Leaks with an addon are probably in it's chrome javascript, making https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance:Leak_Tools#leak-monitor your first choice to debug these leaks, probably followed by a debug build.

Also, if you are working at debugging leaks, I'd make sure you are working with an Aurora or Nightly build as a lot of memory leak fixes for Firefox itself have been being committed recently thanks to the MemShrink project.