Opera 9 Memory Leaks

Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical

UPDATE: Get the latest Opera 9.1 beta weeklies at http://my.opera.com/desktopteam. Memory usage has been at all time lows (20MB)!!

The final version of Opera 9 was released a couple of days back, and being an Opera user since release 7.5, I downloaded and installed it right away.. It was okay for the first day, but things start to go downhill pretty soon.. My computer felt laggy, and I brought up the task manager to see which darned process is taking up the resources. To my surprise, Opera.exe was eating up like 200+ MB of memory!! I never had such problems with the previous version of Opera, okay, maybe once or twice.. but with Opera 9 final, it happens nearly every time I re-launch Opera.

I’m writing this blog post in notepad right now, afraid that Opera’s memory usage would spiral out of control. When I started typing, I hit the close button on Opera.. a couple of minutes later, it’s memory usage is now 370+ MB.. and is showing no signs of terminating.. don’t get me wrong, the “Application” has ended, but the Opera.exe process is still in memory.. 390+ MB now.. time to end the process.. on computers with 256 MB of memory, you’d probably wanna press the restart button..

For now, I think I’ll just try using Firefox 2.0 beta (Bon Echo).. didn’t notice that there was a built in spell checker.. cool!

Permalink | June 25th, 2006

7 Responses to “Opera 9 Memory Leaks”

  1. angel Says:
    June 25th, 2006 at 8:03 pm

    Hello there! Was just reading your About area and u said that FF uses up alotta memory? Oh dear…no wonder my 256MB is getting so slow nowadays… or izit bcos already old… :|
    Is FF 2.0 betta?

  2. Jonathan Ng Says:
    June 25th, 2006 at 10:16 pm

    Yes, Firefox 2.0 is beta (now in alpha 3). You can check it out here.

    Well, I would say it’s kinda old.. most modern browsers (other than IE6), use quite a lot of memory.. 30 MB at least.. IE7 uses around that amount too.. so it’s time you consider buying an additional stick of RAM.. 512 MB goes for about RM 160 if not mistaken.. pretty affordable IMO..

  3. Jeffrey04 Says:
    June 25th, 2006 at 10:30 pm

    eh.. i used Opera 9 during their beta stage… and the memory usage is just around that lar (as u mentioned 370MB+)….. so it is not solved yet?!

    eh.. a lot of ppl saying that bon echo has improved their memory usage…. and i think they will start the beta test soon, probably consider upgrading lo…. if my newsfox extension is working with it….

  4. Jonathan Ng Says:
    June 25th, 2006 at 11:19 pm

    I never had such problems in the Opera betas, maybe just once in a week of heavy usage (my computer used to be on 24/7).. but now it happens everytime I use Opera.. sigh…

    Bon Echo still lacks many basic features.. some extensions don’t work on Bon Echo… if you ask me, memory problems aside, Firefox has a long way to go to even match Opera in terms of out-of-the-box features..

    Another thing about Bon Echo’s memory usage is: it doesn’t change even if the window’s minimized! In the Opera betas, say it use like 50-60 MB of memory, when it’s minimized, this figure drops to 20-30.. it’s just normal for any software.. but not for Bon Echo.. weird…

  5. Andrew_Mj Says:
    June 29th, 2006 at 10:30 pm

    Is something amiss here? I’ve been using Opera 9 since its release. I’ve just checked my memory usage and its only using 70 Megs!

  6. Jonathan Ng Says:
    June 29th, 2006 at 10:42 pm

    Andrew: maybe it depends on the sites u visit or system configuration. Anyways, 70 Megs is quite a LOT for a web browser.. go check it again.. i’ll bet it’s increasing..

    as mentioned here (http://jnls.net/2006/6/resource-intensive-apps), the latest Opera 9.1 build seems to have solved this problem.. only 20-30 MB of usage..

  7. Benjamin Says:
    July 14th, 2006 at 3:40 am

    Between Safari, Firefox, & Opera, they all chew up my RAM like crazy. Fortunately I’m getting a 1 gig stick of RAM.

    512 MB RAM/Intel Core Duo Processor/Apple Macbook Pro

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