I tend to leave my PCs running for convenience.  Even with an XP desktop system I’ve been known to go two months without a reboot.  But the latest version of Firefox is really testing my ability to do so without having to carefully manage my applications.  Consider this:

That’s with six open windows running since Thursday (approximately 5 days).  There’s absolutely no good reason for a web browser to be sucking up nearly 1GB of RAM.  Up until I switched to Firefox 2.0 I didn’t have this problem.

I’ve done some searching in Google and there are some pages that suggest lowering the overall page cache, but there are others that say it won’t make a difference.  I really started noticing this on my old laptop as it would get horribly sluggish after a couple of days.  I’d check the running processes to find that Firefox was using 350MB or more, which is really bad on a system with 512MB.  I only noticed it on this system today because opening new windows was becoming very slow (this system has 2GB, which seems to have masked the problem somewhat).

I’m going to give the memory cache trick a try.  Hopefully it’ll do the trick.  Otherwise I either have to switch back to IE (I hate IE 7’s interface) or restart Firefox every other day.

Update:  Looking at some of the threads about memory leaks with Firefox I saw that the first response was always to have you delete all extensions and then see if the problem still occurred.  If not, then add the extensions back one by one until you found the culprit.  In this case, it turns out to be v1.5.0.32 of the PayPal Virtual Debit Card beta.  They only recently added support for Firefox, and I suspect that they did something naughty in their code that’s causing a memory leak.  I’ve submitted a report so that hopefully they can fix it soon.