Before my first post here, I had spent several hours searching the web for Firefox memory problems and had stumbled across both of the links you supplied (amongst many others), but your posting of these links here caused me to go back and reread those two in their entirety. Thank you for the direction.
As I read those posts and others, it becomes very clear that the existence of "Firefox memory leakage problems" is a highly debatable point with many people concluding that the only thing you can blame Firefox for is its failure to clean up after poorly implemented extensions and java applications, plus Firefox's decision to cache-to-memory a limited number of recently visited web pages (a so called feature).
I knew that Firefox extensions and plug-ins were not my problem as I had installed none. I had not previously been a Firefox user, so this was a fresh install of the latest version from firefox.com. The only Firefox extension that I have recently started experimenting with is dragdropupload, but that experimentation began well after my observations of massive Firefox memory growth while using Zimbra.
I had previously tried the Firefox configuration changes suggested by the posters on various blogs and forums to disable or restrict the cache-to-memory "feature" of Firefox, and although I could definitely see that these changes had an impact on Firefox memory consumption when browsing common web pages, I found that there was no improvement of the problem I am witnessing when using Zimbra.
I continue to see uncontrolled growth of Firefox memory usage with every new Zimbra email I compose in a separate window (and with each instance of Zimbra that I launch and subsequently close); memory is never fully released. Plus the problem is only worse when I tried using the latest version of IE6, where composing each new Zimbra email causes about 15MB of memory to be consumed and never released after the new email window closes.
Of all of the comments I have read in the blogs and forums, this is the one that I now find the most interesting: “Most memory leaks in Firefox are caused by developers of extensions and developers that use JavaScript in web pages. The main cause of this is not cleaning up event handlers on unload.”
Again, I am not using any Firefox extensions and I would like to think that Java itself is not the problem, so that continues to leave me wondering if Zimbra is failing to clean up after itself when a "compose new email" window closes or an instance of Zimbra running in a Firefox Tab is closed.
So I guess I need some specific direction on how to eliminate this uncontrolled Firefox memory growth when using Zimbra. Nothing I have found posted on the web has helped me to solve the problem, except the Firefox configuration change of adding "config.trim_on_minimize" does help on PCs only, but unfortunately we use mostly Macs here.
Should I dump Firefox? What Browser would you suggest?
Can anyone else confirm my observations while using Zimbra within Firefox and IE6?
Has Zimbra confirmed that the problem is not a "not cleaning up event handlers on unload" problem as some have suggested?
Thanks again for listening.
Dave  |