Opera eating up lots of RAM

Opera eating up lots of RAM

operaactingweird.png

Hello,

Just curious whether this is happening only with my computer or Opera generally eats up a lot of RAM. In the attached image Opera is using 300MB of my RAM!!! What is this supposed to mean?

Originally posted by rnathbatra:

Just curious whether this is happening only with my computer or Opera generally eats up a lot of RAM. In the attached image Opera is using 300MB of my RAM!!! What is this supposed to mean?

How many tabs do you have open? 300MB isn't much if you have java/flash intensive sites open. But your CPU usage seems too high.

I had to reinstall Opera 10.53 to see why my Opera takes 2 mins to open. So I figured the reason it does, the version 10.53 eats too MUCH RAM! Is there a way to fix this?

Originally posted by antipervert:

Is there a way to fix this?

Sadly no fix, this is just the nature of the beast.

Originally posted by rushad0:

Sadly no fix, this is just the nature of the beast.

I don't have such problems on my machine...

Originally posted by rafaelluik:

I don't have such problems on my machine...

A new clean install may fix the slow start problem. However, large RAM usage is real with not fix.

Originally posted by zz90210:

Originally posted by soldier1st:

disable plugins globaly and restart opera and enable on sites that need it.

How many websites have you ever visited? Four? If that is how many, your "suggestion" would make sense. Otherwise, expecting people to change settings for a dozens or scores of sites is ludicrous.

What you blathered is not a solution. It is dumping Opera's failure onto the users.

what i blathered is not blather it is a suggestion and if you don't want to read it then simply don't read it and i ain't expecting people to do it, it is a choice not an order to see if it can help them and i visit tones of sites per day, most work and the rare ones don't but those that don't i try to fix and if not i use another browser just for that page and i learn as i go so i can pass that info down to others and where does it say that i expect people to change settings? you won't find it and never will, perhaps you should learn to read more and understand more so you can understand what others are saying and if your not sure then ask and they will tell you then you will know for the next time as to avoid any confusion and i never said it was a solution, it could be a workaround or maybe even a possible solution... read the word possible, that does not mean it is definate but a trial and error sort of thing.

Originally posted by soldier1st:

I don't have such problems on my machine...

Now, 186 Mb memory and 252 vm memory.
1.122.360 page fails and and increasing.
47 pages on garbage.

Xp SP3

Originally posted by rafaelluik:

Originally posted by rushad0:

Sadly no fix, this is just the nature of the beast.

I don't have such problems on my machine...

Well I do have the virtual memory problem in windows xp sp3. I don't know if I have it in my windows 7 64 since I never notice a visible slowdown due to opera. I might have but since I turn off the machine every day it could pass unnoticed. The machine specs are also different.

By the way I'm waiting already 15m for opera to close. Virtual memory went from 1.6G to 1G. Guess I'll have to wait some more. The problem in my case is that the virtual memory isn't released in the same way as the working set memory. As such I often end with 1G plus of virtual memory but only 300M of working set memory. Working set memory also goes dramatically down when I minimize opera (it doesn't go down when I hide it. wonder why? I think it should.) but the virtual memory remains about the same. 25 minutes have passed and virtual memory at 500M.

Now, 220 Mb memory and 491 vm memory.
1.732.358 page fails and and increasing.

Opera is in the process of closing 20+ minutes. When I close I had about 1.6G in vm and 300M in memory.

Xp SP3

Opera can take 30 minutes to an hour to close for me. The virtual memory takes forever to unload

Experiencing the same issues more or less with WIN2K PRO. Is a fix in the works, or perhaps the better question is; have the devs even acknowledged this problem?

I think with the minds that are closed or preoccupied with other things.

any word on memory performance of 10.60 build? is it any better?

MInes eaten all the ram but I find its down to Flash

Might have spoken too soon because I haven't been on any Flash sites yet and its still heavy,

(Using 10.60a)

"any word on memory performance of 10.60 build? is it any better?"

still high

strange, for me it's been using far less memory then all of the previous versions

Originally posted by fefrie:

Isn't it good that Opera uses a lot of ram? The less pagefiling that happens the better right? Less read/writes to the hard drive the better I would assume

You've got a point here; the less pagefiling the better. But this does not mean that a program should use as much memory as possible. Note that I said memory, not RAM. Pretty much everyone here are only concerned about the RAM usage. "Opera use too much RAM". In my case Opera 10 will use more virtual memory than desired, so I won't use it. This is because there is not enough RAM for hungry Opera.

This is Opera 9.64 with 7 tabs open after 3 hours of browsing:

The left column is RAM usage, the right column is virtual memory usage. I didn't read all the pages here, but everyone I saw that posted a screenshot of their Task Manager had only RAM usage visible. The interesting bit is how much virtual memory does Opera use, and RAM + virtual = TOTAL memory usage.
It is the (total) memory usage of Opera 10 that bugs me.

Originally posted by rox33rox33not11:

Yup, its using way too much ram. I'm still using the version from 2 years ago. Opera 8.5

Wow and I thought I used an old version... 9.64.

Originally posted by thewasteland:

Any modern browser is going to use a hundred megs of RAM and up just sitting around. Anyone who says otherwise is still running IE6.

You want a solution? Buy more RAM. It's a purchase you can literally only regret if you cheapskate on it and buy a terrible off-brand which burns out in a week, otherwise, it has no downside.

Actually I am running IE6 on occasions. Its biggest flaw is security, but I don't use it unless it's one of those rare cases where a trusted page won't load in Opera.

Buying more RAM is a solution, but it is not the ideal solution. Why do we want apps that waste memory? Where is it going to end? Programs doesn't have to be that big. My laptop with XP was a monster some years ago, 1GHz and 320 MB RAM. The machine is as old as Windows XP, from the early 2000's. All the three memory slots are in use, and it's not worth paying 2-300 Euros to get a little bit more RAM.
And it should not be necessary to buy a new computer in order to run XP, write a document and read stuff on the internet.

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

>You want a solution? Buy more RAM

What if you are using a laptop, and your machine is limited to max. 1 GB (my case)? Buy another laptop? What if you are using a laptop, and don't want to buy memory which is usually much more expensive than desktop's (almost all laptops have the same issue...)?
The race to consumption is rubbish, and having the ability to add more RAM is not an excuse for modern programming manners which make software need more and more and more ressources under the pretext of speed gain.... The speed gain exist only for those who either already have a lot of RAM, or want to buy more. Those who are not in this case are screwed.
10.51 using 250 MB here as I type, with 6 tabs open.

Excellent, I agree totally.

people keep opening new forums for high memory/ram usage. this thread needs to be made sticky so all comments are received in same place.

Wintop reports 5584KB for code and 60544KB for data (at this instant with just this page open). 10.53, Win98SE, P2 400MHz 128MB.

10.51, Vista, 2GB RAM...

Its using 668MB, with 4 tabs. Its always used a lot, and i'm alright with it. Its better then anything else Ive used.

One thing though, if it DOES ram leak, do this:
-Open about 200 so notepads/very small programs
-close them all at once (right click > close group)

I did that when something ram leaked once. It shot down my ram usage from 98% to 51%.

Originally posted by TheDoctorRRU:

10.51, Vista, 2GB RAM...

Its using 668MB, with 4 tabs. Its always used a lot, and i'm alright with it. Its better then anything else Ive used.

One thing though, if it DOES ram leak, do this:
-Open about 200 so notepads/very small programs
-close them all at once (right click > close group)

I did that when something ram leaked once. It shot down my ram usage from 98% to 51%.

Cacheman (a prog) does that too. Recovers mem.

Here 174 tabs in 6 windows, mail and unite web server: 841 Mb of ram use on 4GB, not really a problem.
Opera likes caching webpages, for fast returning whithin pages and revisiting pages. (really nice when your using a slow connection)

The bells and whistles are especially flash (etc) apps (used video = cached) are bad for ram use.

It appears I oftenly meet the same today, and it appears even with no PDF nor video in any tabs. I open a link in a new tab, suddenly Opera went very slow and the hard drive is running all the time. Ctrl+Alt+Del shows Opera use 700MB RAM while I have 1G. It eats all the available memory and end into consuming swap memory, even with as less as three tabs containing basic pages.

If I close Opera and re-restart, memory consumption is very lower : around 100 to 150MB.

Something also : when I close it, it takes long to close, about 5 minutes.

It happened multiple times today.

Don't know why it started to behave differently since today, as I did not change anything.

Opera 10.53, Windows XP, 1G RAM

Greetings and Salutations.
The thing that really annoys me about Opera is this unfixed memory leak. I can watch it eating more and more memory when it is just SITTING THERE, until it pushed memory usage up to the point that the OS starts swapping pages out to disk. That swapping is what brings everything to a screeching halt. I have been using Opera for a number of years. Like many others I was attracted to it because it was small, fast and agile. However, apparently, like Steven Segal, as it is reaching middle age, it is developing a beer gut, and slowing down to a crawl. Kind of a shame, but, it can happen.
Right now, for example, I am running Mozilla to post this. It has been up for a a while and, is running 7 tabs. It is peaking out at using 8% of the memory in my laptop. IF I were in Opera, with the same tabs open for the same length of time, it would be sucking up 65% to 70% of memory...and probably starting to creak to a crawl because of swapping pages out to disk.
Now...I may only have a gig of memory in the laptop, but, I am running the current version of OpenSuSE, and, have no problems with OTHER programs.
I still like Opera, and, tend to use it, but, having to shut it down and restart it every hour or so is becoming a nagging irritation.
regards
dave mundt

Opera 9.64 can also use alot of memory sometimes....

I had not closed Opera for about 4 days of heavy usage, it was an experiment. In the end Opera used about 150 MB or RAM and it had cached an additional 500+ MB on the page file. That is about 650 MB.

During those days I had had many tabs opened at times, but the high memory usage persisted also after I had closed all tabs.

I have 320 MB of RAM installed and the pc was acting veery slow until I closed Opera. The page file peaked at 1.3 GB (I used other programs too).

The 10.60 alpha uses about 1.8 GB cached in the page file for me and 600-700 in RAM after 30 minutes for me (total 1 GB of ram)

An option to remove cached pages (RAM and cache) would be a good solution. Who knows built on the "Close Tabs".

Originally posted by robsonpc:

An option to remove cached pages (RAM and cache) would be a good solution.

We need to clear VM too, usually it's the VM that causing the problem when page file bubbled up & won't going down...

Can't understand that : 4 tabs opened, 720MB (Ok, like multiple times reported in this thread, nothing new so far). So I decided to close Opera and to restart it : it had broke a new record of 20 minutes to shut-down! Then I restarted it : crash!

What's happening to Opera ?

Did the same again
800MB, was consuming so much memory and was so much slowed down that it was not unable to open a web page and was displaying a blank area instead -> decision to shutdown -> near to 15 minutes to shutdown ... again

I've had Opera take 30+ minutes to shut down before (I have to restart it every time the virtual memory gets past 1.2 GB because I get disk thrashing then). I don't know why it's so slow to close but I think it's something to do with reading cache from the page file to the RAM, and writing that somewhere else on the hard drive. It's REALLY annoying.

I'm not sure it's related to cache because I get this behaviour (though NOT 30 minutes and not even 15, but not rarely 3 to 3 minutes) with cache (disk AND RAM) off... I haven't been able to isolated it yet (I've tried disabling plug-ins etc., to no avail - Opera is just slow to close, which is tremendously annoying especially that the problem can't be traced!).

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

[...] Opera is just slow to close, [...]

Better say it is *now* slow, as it was not always the same. Prior versions of Opera was fast in all areas. It seems most troubles started with Opera 10 and especially 10.5x

You are right, I meant it the way you say but should have been more precise. It is slow, as you say, since the 10.x versions, esp. the 10.5x.

What about Opera 10.54 ? I had a notification about it, but did not installed it as I was afraid things may perhaps go even worse with this new version.

Any feed-back ?

Originally posted by Hibou57:

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

[...] Opera is just slow to close, [...]

It seems most troubles started with Opera 10 and especially 10.5x

Do you (or anyone else) recall what was the major changes in 10? I think that was when Opera got a new look, I don't know what they changed beneath the surface. Maybe the core was reconstructed.

10.60: about 30 tabs open, few thousand items in Cache, Clear and Exit then wait 'til HDD activity stops and RAM recovers=8 seconds. That's not slow.

>Do you (or anyone else) recall what was the major changes in 10?

Unfortunately I don't! But I can say that 10.10 is much lighter on resources than 10.5x and beyond, so something definitely changed then.

Originally posted by Vikingen:

Do you (or anyone else) recall what was the major changes in 10? I think that was when Opera got a new look, I don't know what they changed beneath the surface. Maybe the core was reconstructed.

If I'm not wrong, this was the version with which Presto was introduced. By the way, if you look at Opera signature, you started to have something like this :

Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; fr) Presto/2.5.24 Version/10.53

It always displays Opera/9.80, whatever the real version is, and instead, the real version is at the end next to the Presto version.

There was also a switch from the previous rendering engine to a full vector graphic rendering engine.

And there was the new format for the mail data-base (which is unfortunately incompatible with the one of previous version, so there is no way to downgrade )

I feel to remember internal modifications was the big deal of Opera 10, and Opera 10 is indeed not any more the same Opera as prior version of Opera.

P.S. Do some people know about Opera 10.54 ? Worse of better ? I don't want to upgrade before I am sure it is really better.

Originally posted by Hibou57:

P.S. Do some people know about Opera 10.54 ? Worse of better ? I don't want to upgrade before I am sure it is really better.

it was mainly a bug/stability release. no significant changes to the core.

So.... 10.54 sucks too, for RAM/virtual memory/closing/etc issues.

Anyone have experience to share about 10.60 beta?

I don't know where it does come from, while I'm pretty sure this has something to deal with bad memory management, as seems to suggest the numerous crashes I have some days (older versions of Opera was far more stable). In many applications, this kind of crash is due to bad pointer assignment, bad memory management, and the likes.

As a user of the Ada programming language, I would say I am near to be sure Opera is mainly written in C or C++ (this kind of flaws and failures are typical of C or C++ applications... and even worse with C++ in some ways).

It seems that 10.60B1 uses less RAM and performs faster than 10.54... But, don't expect RAM usage to be the same as Opera 9.64, it still uses more than that (but less than 10.5x series, from what I can tell).

>(this kind of flaws and failures are typical of C or C++ applications... and even worse with C++ in some ways)

Absolutely! C++ is powerful but very easy to mess up with...
I've given a very short try to 10.6 - won't allow me to open the 10 tabs I want for a memory test, it crashes before...

Management is much better. When it reaches the peak of 220mb and start to close the tabs after a while the VM starts to decrease. I do not know if I have to do with a bug in GMail but then they got the memory usage has improved a lot.

Originally posted by TripleDude:

It seems that 10.60B1 uses less RAM and performs faster than 10.54

i don't mind high memory usage because that has possibility of improving performance. but Opera has to release memory when closing tabs.

Originally posted by rushad0:

Originally posted by TripleDude:

It seems that 10.60B1 uses less RAM and performs faster than 10.54

i don't mind high memory usage because that has possibility of improving performance. but Opera has to release memory when closing tabs.

Just minimize Opera and maximize it afterwards, RAM usage will drop--it clears out the cache whenever you minimize Opera.

This is a feature and closed tabs are meant to be cached (so that when you press Ctrl + Z, it will quickly open up the previously closed tabs).

Opera still closes very slowly for me with the latest builds of 10.60 even though the RAM useage is ok The VM will be at about 1.2 GB when Opera really starts to affect my computer's performance and I have to restart it. At this point Opera takes 15-30 minutes to close, and the RAM useage increases by 100-200 MB.

Originally posted by Astrophizz:

[...] and the RAM useage increases by 100-200 MB.

You wanted to say “decreases” I suppose (as you are closing Opera)

I have exactly the same : the first times it happened, I opened the process window and saw the same as you. It takes long to close because it releases memory by small amounts, step by step.

>i don't mind high memory usage because that has possibility of improving performance
Actually, that's a myth for almost all applications. I'm not sure where it originated from, though.

>Just minimize Opera and maximize it afterwards, RAM usage will drop
VM stays the same and RAM usage grows again when you maximise it (not sure what happens to the RAM cache, I have it disabled)

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

>i don't mind high memory usage because that has possibility of improving performance
Actually, that's a myth for almost all applications. I'm not sure where it originated from, though.

>Just minimize Opera and maximize it afterwards, RAM usage will drop
VM stays the same and RAM usage grows again when you maximise it (not sure what happens to the RAM cache, I have it disabled)

1)That's actually not a myth, because the RAM can be used to cache currently unused feature--but once it's in memory, and the user access it, it will open right away instead of having to load it from the harddrive when the user wants to use it. But you're right, it shouldn't increase performance of normal usage.

2) Yes, the RAM will grow again once you maximize, but it will be less than before you closed the tab. VM usage should also decrease (not by a lot, though). VM usage should decrease over time (I had 480MB used, and it decreased to 450MB after closing all the tabs and minimizing/maximizing. As I write this, it's now down to 350MB).

Originally posted by Hibou57:

Originally posted by Astrophizz:

[...] and the RAM useage increases by 100-200 MB.

You wanted to say “decreases” I suppose (as you are closing Opera)

I have exactly the same : the first times it happened, I opened the process window and saw the same as you. It takes long to close because it releases memory by small amounts, step by step.

Actually, RAM usage will spike up as Opera deletes cache from the Hard drive.

Oh, speaking of which, if you guys don't want to wait a long time while you close down Opera, UNCHECK "Empty on Exit" under Preference -> Advanced -> History. This will make Opera close MUCH faster as it will not be clearing out the cache when it closes... However, be warned that the cache can grow to extremely large sizes (but you can manually delete all the cached item yourself, and it should be much faster--for some reason, Opera is very slow when deleting its own cache!).

>1)That's actually not a myth, because the RAM can be used to cache currently unused feature--but once it's in memory, and the user access it, it will >open right away instead of having to load it from the harddrive when the user wants to use it.

That's a point, you're right. In this case, I think either a limit should be drawn (which features are cached, whcih are not?), or there must be an option to cache or not (I don't trust applications that detect how much memory you have installed and "brightly" decide what to do - in theory it is nice, in practice it doesn't work well for various reasons, the most important being that the programme cannot know how you use your computer). Considering that all people use opera differently, I think it should be off by default. Besides, loading from disk will be slow only the first time you do it - it'd be cached afterwards. Then you could imagine some simple clocks - unload feature x from memory (which does not mean transfer it to VM, but destroy the code from memory) after x seconds of not being used, or something similar.
It's a bit like the start-up loaders of such apps as openoffice - they eat ressources themselves but the performance gain is minimal, and it's potentially useful only once - when you open OO the first time.

>2) Yes, the RAM will grow again once you maximize, but it will be less than before you closed the tab. VM usage should also decrease (not by a lot, ?>though). VM usage should decrease over time (I had 480MB used, and it decreased to 450MB after closing all the tabs and minimizing/maximizing. >As I write this, it's now down to 350MB).

I've just performed a test on my laptop (XP SP3, opera 10.53, 1 GB RAM). I have 19 open tabs, including this one, the mail panel, and a draft message. I've minimised and restored opera.

Before minimising:

VM: 618 256 KB / RAM: 76 820 KB

After minimising / restoring:

VM: 619 476 KB / RAM: 28 300 KB

After clicking each tab to bring it into view once (not doing anything else):

VM: 619 476 KB / RAM: 85 128 KB

So what I observe is that VM usage grows, RAM usage gets lower upon restoring but once I navigate through the tabs, just bringing them into view, it is higher than before.

Cheers

Originally posted by TripleDude:

Just minimize Opera and maximize it afterwards, RAM usage will drop--it clears out the cache whenever you minimize Opera.

This does not work. Everyone keeps saying this but it has never been confirmed by a developer.

Opera uses too much memory. Opera takes too long to unload from memory when it's closed. A browser should know its place; the user is the important one, software is a servant. End of.

Can't limits adequately be set in Preferences > Advanced > History > Memory cache? Try something other than Automatic that suits your needs based on the system configuration.

Originally posted by gedq:

Opera uses too much memory. Opera takes too long to unload from memory when it's closed. A browser should know its place; the user is the important one, software is a servant. End of.

That's true, but what can you expect from a freeware...

While we are noticing about Opera 10 flaws (always important to note it started with Opera 10), we also should not forgot we cannot legitimately require or demand anything : Opera developers are not our slaves.

That is true users should be the main target of an application or application should be a servant as you said. But what should be developers for users ? When developers receive nothing from users ?

>That's true, but what can you expect from a freeware...

Here I must say that I disagree, because some freewares are extremely neatly conceived and are made with professional quality (Autohoteky of jkdefrag for instance come to mind)

>While we are noticing about Opera 10 flaws (always important to note it started with Opera 10), we also should not forgot we cannot legitimately >require or demand anything : Opera developers are not our slaves.

That's true! But I think the demand comes from the fact users love opera and are frustrated such an annoying problem is not fixed, while cosmetics are being improved upon. At the same time, opera boasts being "the fastest on earth" and they do benefit (financially, that is) from a large user's base; so in a way, even though we don't directly pay them (though some of us, including myself, did back then), they are entitled to provide us with good-quality software.

Cheers

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

That's true, but what can you expect from a freeware...

now that's just not making sense... internet browser market is all about freewares. totally cannot be an excuse. when was the last time anyone paid for a browser?

Originally posted by rushad0:

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

That's true, but what can you expect from a freeware...

now that's just not making sense... internet browser market is all about freewares. totally cannot be an excuse. when was the last time anyone paid for a browser?

With due respect, this reply answers nothing : you just said “no body ever paid for a browser”... where does browser come from ? Don't you tkink it is a lot of job ? Do you think this is made by a special human specy ? Just be realistic...

Don't stop to “this is like this, and I don't want to know more”, and go further with questions like “how can this be like this ?”

What good job would you do yourself for nothing ?

I am pretty sure if this was not freeware, things may be different.

Any way, this does not solve the memory issue. It seems no body really know what's going on, and there is no way to downgrade due to a mail data base format issue. There was assumptions stating minimizing and maximizing Opera should solve the trick, ... but it simply don't. There has been assumption about Windows memory management... but this just occurs with Opera and with no other application. I am afraid we are just reporting troubles to a hole.

What can we do except waiting with the hope a future version will give an end to these troubles...

We can just wait and hope, and cannot require/demand anything, that is just that.

Originally posted by Hibou57:

you just said “no body ever paid for a browser”... where does browser come from ?

no offense intended. just wanted to clarify that being a freeware is not an excuse for shady performance.
let's all just hope Opera fixes the memory performance issues. it is such a good browser, with a few flaws.

>What can we do except waiting with the hope a future version will give an end to these troubles...
>We can just wait and hope, and cannot require/demand anything, that is just that.

You are right that we should wait and hope, though there is one thing we can do - push. Keep reporting that the problem is not solved, post error reports, try to get in touch with the developers etc. etc. The more people show that they are unhappy, the more it prompts the developers to act.
Indeed, such problems can (and usually do) occur in all applications you can think of, but usually they are fixed swiftly (slower for most freeware programmes but not all of them as some have very responsive and dedicated dev. teams). The frustration here comes from the fact that the problem has been known for a while but it has not been addressed. We don't know whether it is being addressed. No dev. has posted a clue here, though they do sometimes participate in threads. Would it be something to do with cosmetics, or a minor bug, people would't be so chafed up; but it is a major flaw and the fact that opera has nice features does not justify in itself that it should in some cases use more than 1 GB of RAM to display a few simple pages, at least in my opinion.

Cheers

That is true users should be the main target of an application or application should be a servant as you said. But what should be developers for users ? When developers receive nothing from users ?

Developers do receive something from users. Or rather, search engines receive user searches from browsers and they pay to browser developers for that. The way i see it, users can demand new features. They pay with their searches. Also, it's not like developers are coding browsers for themselves. On Opera site it says: "Try the new Opera 10.60 beta". They want me to try it. So i can demand what i want, because it's developers who want me to use their product.

Originally posted by Hibou57:

Originally posted by Vikingen:

Do you (or anyone else) recall what was the major changes in 10? I think that was when Opera got a new look, I don't know what they changed beneath the surface. Maybe the core was reconstructed.

If I'm not wrong, this was the version with which Presto was introduced. By the way, if you look at Opera signature, you started to have something like this :

Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; fr) Presto/2.5.24 Version/10.53

It always displays Opera/9.80, whatever the real version is, and instead, the real version is at the end next to the Presto version.

Presto? Never heard about it before.
But it turns out that I have Presto/2.1.1 in Opera 9.64.

When you say 'Opera signature', I guess you mean the request the browser send to the web page. As shown here: https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2, click "Proceed", look under the blue "ShieldsUP!! Services" bar and click "Browser Headers".

Originally posted by rnathbatra:

operaactingweird.png

Hello,

Just curious whether this is happening only with my computer or Opera generally eats up a lot of RAM. In the attached image Opera is using 300MB of my RAM!!! What is this supposed to mean?

If "physical memory" is same as RAM, then you are only using 52% of it at the moment of the screenshot. Opera using 328 MB of RAM can be caused by heavy web pages, you didn't say anything about that or how many tabs you had open.

As long as you have enough RAM, it is preferred to use RAM instead of virtual memory, because RAM is much faster. You have not set your Task Manager to also show virtual memory usage (why not?), so the total amount of memory usage by Opera at that time is unknown.

Originally posted by Hibou57:

Originally posted by Astrophizz:

[...] and the RAM useage increases by 100-200 MB.

You wanted to say “decreases” I suppose (as you are closing Opera)

No, I mean when I close Opera, the RAM useage increases by 100-200 MB for the greater duration of the closing time. Only in the last minute or two of closing does the RAM useage actually drop. So for instance the RAM useage will increase from 400 MB to 600+ MB over a few minutes, then Opera will slowly release virtual memory for 15+ minutes, then the RAM useage will decrease and Opera will close.

I also have a problem. Internet Explorer 6/7/8 uses a lot of memory! That's because its performance is being offset by Windows, so it appears that other browsers use more resources. So in fact, Windows is using too much memory!

I just thought I add to this broken record debating. It's already been explained why Opera uses so much memory. If you think that IE is more efficient, guess again.

This is a picture of Opera in idle state for about 30 minutes, before it freeze & then crashed a few minutes ago.
8 opened tabs without any plug-ins content, & all plug-ins are disabled.

Opera 10.6
WinXP2, 512 RAM

EDIT:
I just receive news that 10.6 is in RC1!!! THIS IS NOT GOOD, I have a feeling that we are going to get another unstable Stable/Final released.

I don't understand why lowering the memory cache isn't attempted under the circumstances. Clearly, "automatic" isn't doing the job so drop to 20-60 MB and see how it affects your system. Setting 40 MB vs Automatic reduced VM from >250M to 180M with 6 tabs in XP2 w/ 1G. No particular CPU problem either way.

>I don't understand why lowering the memory cache isn't attempted under the circumstances.
We've all tried that. The numbers I've reported throughout this thread are with RAM and disk cache disabled.
How many open tabs did you have when you took this screenshot?

Cheers.

Originally posted by CraigPD:

... with 6 tabs in XP2 w/ 1G.

I have yet to exceed 250MB VM with 8-10 tabs of assorted intensity after making the change. Prior to that it would frequently hit 3-400MB. Maybe use some rather than no disk cache - default 20 MB here.

I'm sorry, I missed this part of your post! So you have quite a low RAM usage, that's interesting.
Actually I've already tried several combinations of cache, and find that the disk cache doesn't do much to RAM usage - as far as the numbers I get are reproduceable (of course, it depends to the state of the computer and this is hardly reproduceable, but every time I followed this procedure: changed the setting, rebooted the computer, then re-started), enabling disk cache doesn't change memory usage, within 5%. I did that with 10.51, so I'll re-try with 10.53, my current version, so as to check whether it makes a difference.
I agree with you that setting RAM cache to auto uses a lot of memory and that it's best to either disable it or at least select a fixed value.
Cheers

I tried a few things, and find that enabling disk cache (20MB, for instance) actually increases RAM usage - +60MB in the VM (in addition to the reference ~608,000 KB), +20MB in RAM (in addition to the ~414,000KB) with 10.53.
Strange....

1.png
I don't think it is too large
Memory cache automatic & Disk cache off ,Win7 X64

Originally posted by Morality124:

I also have a problem. Internet Explorer 6/7/8 uses a lot of memory! That's because its performance is being offset by Windows, so it appears that other browsers use more resources. So in fact, Windows is using too much memory!

I just thought I add to this broken record debating. It's already been explained why Opera uses so much memory. If you think that IE is more efficient, guess again.

The memory usage of Opera 9 and IE6 are similar. It's the two browsers I am using.

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

>I don't understand why lowering the memory cache isn't attempted under the circumstances.
We've all tried that. The numbers I've reported throughout this thread are with RAM and disk cache disabled.
How many open tabs did you have when you took this screenshot?

Cheers.

RAM and VM cache disabled? Do not disable RAM cache, it is the fastest cache.

I have "disabled" VM cache, that means I've set it to 'none'. In reality Opera is still using VM cache but it is using as little as possible.
The RAM cache is on 'automatic'.

I have read the most of the posts on this thread....now I will tell my story:

I started using Opera a six years ago.WHY? Because the computer at work had a 512 ram and as a developer I was using more ram form my dev environment. At that period I was using the FF browser, and as you know the FF had a memory issue. So I had to close and restart the browser every 30 minutes...and then I tried the Opera, and I was using the Opera for all day surfing on the Web so it had allocated a 160 MB of ram regarding the FF's 30 min browsing and 500 MB of ram.

Since then I have never stopped using the Opera...It is fast, it has all the features, and it was using a minimum of RAM. But everything has changed from the 10.10....It uses a lot of memory. And I thing that is a real problem, because I am not using my 4 gigs of RAM only for surfing the WEB. There is my development ide and some other apps. Before the 10.10 version of Opera I had never experienced a "Opera is not responding"...and waiting to close a tab.

So what ever you say, the Opera was known for its small usage of memory, for its fast browsing the web, and for its stability.Each of its features now its gone. So Opera has to be back on its tracks.

>RAM and VM cache disabled? Do not disable RAM cache, it is the fastest cache.

Sure, but I don't want to have cache. I am on a fast connection but on low memory, therefore I don't want to use cache but would like to save as much RAM as possible. I don't like disk cache much because I don't like the idea of either storing junk on my disk, or having opera being even slower at shutdown if I ask it to empty the disk cache automatically. I don't feel the need for a cache with the kind of connection I have most of the time (when I'm on slow wifi it's a different story, of course).
I don't think you can really call it VM cache, it's rather disk cache - files are copied there and fetched when needed, they are not, or at least should not, be retained in memory; but VM is really virtual memory, and I wouldn't be surprised were you to find there part of the contents of your RAM cache (or does opera know that when you are low on real memory, RAM cache should NOT be transferred to VM? I'd be surprised if it did.).
Cheers

Ah, and yesterday I had several (4-5) fairly long youtube videos loaded each in one tab, + some 20 tabs of text opened. Memory usage climbed to ~950MB VM / ~700 RAM, then opera crashed....

Opera 9.64 is not too bad memory vice... I've been webshopping music and videos and visited alot of pages for six hours now. I currently have 24 tabs open. Opera memory usage: 161000 kB RAM, 232000 kB virtual memory. What would it been for Opera 10? Ten times higher?

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

I don't think you can really call it VM cache, it's rather disk cache - files are copied there and fetched when needed, they are not, or at least should not, be retained in memory; but VM is really virtual memory, and I wouldn't be surprised were you to find there part of the contents of your RAM cache (or does opera know that when you are low on real memory, RAM cache should NOT be transferred to VM? I'd be surprised if it did.).
Cheers

VM, disk cache and page file is all the same thing. Your OS is storing things temporary in the page file in order to not use too much RAM. The RAM can never end up as virtual memory.
Maybe this is not what you meant, I can hardly read at the moment.

I just tried the 10.60 RC3, fresh install. It is using 422MB ram with four tabs open (gmail, yahoo mail, bbc news, and opera forums)

all four of these sites are well respected and garbage free. no idea why it should use this much memory, ridiculous.

EDIT: when i close all four tabs, RAM usage still remains at 345MB... with no tabs open.

just updated and i wish i didn't. please fix this

I've been using Opera for years - I've already used it, when it had ads in it. But today I'm at a point, where I really have to think about using a new browser. I've seen a lot of compatibility issues since the release of Version 10, but overlooked them, because I really love opera. But now, since version 10.5 or so, the memory-issue has taken over. I just updated to 10.6, cause I thought that might help. But no, it even got worse. I use Vista and allways have 10 to even 30+ tabs open (wide screen rocks ^^). The memory-usage of opera allways used to be "quite low", compared to firefox i.e. I barely had more than 300 MB, wich isn't little, but totally ok.

But today, Opera uses almost !!! 1.6 GB !!! of my 2 GB RAM. Combined with the OS itself, that results in me having zero to 10 MB of free memory while running Opera. So basically said: No matter how I set up the settings for memory-usage in Opera, Opera allways takes as much memory, as there is - all the way up to 100%. There is just no rationally reason, why an internet browser needs 1.6 GB of space in RAM + the hd cache.

U can image how "vital" my computer starts new tasks and how much "fun" it is, to work with a computer, that needs operas authorisation to WORK... For instance - it takes me exaclty 70 seconds to stark of photoshop CS - Vista itself boots faster than that. And even when it's running, everything inside Photoshop is just terribly slow. No drag and drop without delay, no copy&paste without a hell of a long time of waiting. My computer gets close to unusable if running Opera 10. Even when I just try to open a folder on my desktob it takes me like 40 seconds... That's just not acceptable. Very very very sad. And since Opera doesn't allow ANY controll of memory Usage, I will have to revert to some Opera 9 Version and live with quite some security issues I guess. Ans when Opera isn't fixing this, I will have to use a different browser - Opera literally forces me to do so The only other posibility would be to upgrade my memory - but really - why sould anybody have to upgrade the memory for an internet browser?

a very sad and dissapointed opera user

i have dozen tabs open - its 220mb, how the hell are some of you getting so high usage?

i just hope opera team will fix this major annoyance in 10.6x+ before going to v11 with hardware acceleration

only newcomers annoyed by this thing

Originally posted by supertrol:

i just hope opera team will fix this major annoyance in 10.6x+ before going to v11 with hardware acceleration
only newcomers annoyed by this thing

We are hoping opera team will fix this during 10.5x period, it didn't happened...
so we put our hope in 10.60 STABLE, but it's not fixed either!!!

The problem isn't the high memory usage, the problem is that it keeps doing it even if you close a tab, it keeps that tabs history/files/etc and all in the memory, I think it should erase it at the time you closed that tab.

Originally posted by Toowong:

But today, Opera uses almost !!! 1.6 GB !!! of my 2 GB RAM. Combined with the OS itself, that results in me having zero to 10 MB of free memory while running Opera. So basically said: No matter how I set up the settings for memory-usage in Opera, Opera allways takes as much memory, as there is - all the way up to 100%. There is just no rationally reason, why an internet browser needs 1.6 GB of space in RAM + the hd cache.

Same here today. I was watching a live stream of the World Championship on Dutch TV, using Silverlight, and noticed the RAM usage rising and rising every second. When I reached 1.7 GB I decided enough was enough, and shut down the program and my match. When I fired up Opera again and returned to watch the match, the same thing happened.

Edit: Just watched Spain-Uruguay under Firefox - memory usage was OK.

Originally posted by bleicher:

i have dozen tabs open - its 220mb, how the hell are some of you getting so high usage?

Same here. I have approx. 2,172 tabs open in 2 separate Opera .exe and my total memory usage for both are 706,608 KB and 533,240 KB (for a total of 1.2 GB), so I was shocked too by the fact that some people here have very high memory usage even with just <50 tabs opened . I use Opera 10.10 though

To be honest, I do have the same problems with the newest version (Opera 10.53, I haven't tried the 10.60 ones) so I did some test (by installing/reinstalling & testing each of the earlier versions, one by one LOL! ), and found that Opera 10.10 is the most recent version that is stable enough to endure that many tabs w/o consuming too much memory.

I don't know why but I feel that Opera keeps getting worse when it comes to memory usage! . I hope they fix that problems soon!

>I use Opera 10.10 though

So do I on my desktop, and there indeed I can open dozens of tabs with reasonable RAM usage.
Something happened with 10.5.

I'm fine with Opera using a lot of memory to give me a good browsing experience while I'm using it. For me, when I minimize Opera, I do see the RAM usage drop. My only complaint is that when I "hide" Opera, it does NOT behave as if minimized, even though it seems like it should be minimized while hidden... but that's not how it behaves. Hm. If I minimize Opera, THEN hide it, then I get the decreased RAM usage, but that's a bit laborious considering I have to right-click on the tray icon to do this.

Originally posted by Rossmosis:

For me, when I minimize Opera, I do see the RAM usage drop

A transient condition, at best. To better observe the adverse effects of Opera not releasing VM, select the option in Task Manager to view Virtual Memory Size as well as Memory Usage. No paged (virtual) memory is released by either minimizing or hiding and is only negligibly reduced when closing tabs which in time takes a toll on system performance. Not a cooperative participant.

Got it - thanks for the clarification!

A tangential note - it seems the standard Gmail view adds about 100 MB to Opera's RAM usage compared to the HTML view for all those trying to be thrifty.

well now, I tested a bit more and found out, that opera runs just fine with 18 tabs open - memory usage is around 300 MB. But as soon as I open tab number 19 and 20, memory usage increases to around 800 MB. Interesting about it: The two extra tabs were part of the exact same domain than other tabs I already have open. So it doesn't really matter what sites I am opening, it's just that opera somehow hates having more than 18 tabs open. that's really really annoying. Having in mind, that opera experiences more and more compatibilty issues since version 10, I still have to think about switching to FF. I love Opera and hate FF, but if things keep getting worse, I just have to

Opera used to be the BEST browser in the world. But an error- and bug-free Opera is just past history now.

Originally posted by Toowong:

opera runs just fine with 18 tabs open - memory usage is around 300 MB. But as soon as I open tab number 19 and 20, memory usage increases to around 800 MB

this is the first time i am hearing such issue. i never have more than 6-7 tabs open and RAM usage is till around 400MB

Originally posted by Toowong:

opera runs just fine with 18 tabs open - memory usage is around 300 MB. But as soon as I open tab number 19 and 20, memory usage increases to around 800 MB.

I am working in Linux. With long being fed up with 10.10, I was too excited with the release of 10.60 naively believing it would be a dramatic improvement. Nothing could be further from the truth.

You are not alone, Toowong. I have noticed something similar but, hadn't yet tried to determine the number of open tabs before reaching the mysterious threshold causing Opera to choke whilst gobbling ridiculous amounts of ram and cpu. One reason was that there is always going to be high variability due to unique combinations of number of tabs, sites and content from session to session.

One of the most discouraging aspects of this is that there comes a point where it can take as many as 5 minutes as Opera cpu usage screams simply to add a frickin' bookmark. It has even gotten to the point where, not knowing how long the wait or that I cannot do anything else with the machine, I will flip to another machine by KVM to get something done. This has been a completely new experience since installing 10.60 on two Linux boxes. One machine is a Sempron 2600 w/ 1GB ram and the other is an AXP5000-64 w/ 4GB ram.

In addition, despite settings of 20, 40, 60, whatever MB as maximum for disk cache, Opera just ignores the max setting and ceaselessly accumulates crap without deleting anything to respect the max setting. This being the case, I fail to see what is the point of even having a setting for max disk cache?

With a 20 MB max setting, I have seen disk cache to grow to over 200 MB. Sooner or later, Opera becomes extremely sluggish as it slogs through a bog of temp files looking for something that's probably quicker to grab anew. If I enable empty disk cache on exit, Opera takes f..o..r..e..v..e..r to shut down. So, if I am exiting Opera because it has become a unbearable processor hog, the wait is so excrutiatingly long that I will just kill the opera process and delete the whole damn cache directory manually. Naturally, this requires sudo in a terminal. But, it's still another pain in the arse with which to contend.

I am welcome to suggestions and further questions as long as they don't have anything to do with the size of my bookmarks files. I am a long time Opera user. And as should be expected, my bookmarks files are very large (also differ from machine to machine). Opera is a mature product. And, Opera devs should expect that many long time loyal users are likely to have large bookmark files and structure Opera development accordingly. So, if a proposed "solution" is to reduce bookmark file size, it wouldd be a waste of keystrokes. I would appreciate keeping to yourself as that is not an option that I am in the least bit interested in entertaining.

As a long-time Opera fan since the days when it charged a subscription fee, I too have watched with growing dismay as it became ever more bloated and dissipated with every passing year, just like an ageing rock star. It's a sign of the times I suppose - as cheap memory came in the door, tight coding skills and efficient algorithms went out the window. Version 9.64 was OK but v10 and higher does have major issues, not least to do with the functioning of the vital bookmarks folder. These days it boils down to who can shout loudest and get product out the door quickest in the browser wars I think, not who is the cleverest, has the smallest profile or is the least resource-hungry.

Well until the devs of Opera take a cue from the auto manufacturers who have been forced by the economic slump to improve fuel consumption and clean up their pollution act drastically, we will need to approach the memory-gobbling problem from a system perspective. I think there is possibly some helpful medicine in the freeware CleanMem utility. I found it did an outstanding job of forcing resource hogs (not just browsers) to surrender their loot and it works well for me. It runs when scheduled, cleans and leaves, just like a good tool should. As a bonus it will if you want, log the memory footprint of selected apps before and after they go on a diet.

You can read a fine hands-on review of CleanMem here and its home page is here. If you decide to check it out, do post your experiences (good or bad) here so that others might also benefit. HTH.

P.S. I have 16 tabs open as I type this on Opera 10.6, WinXPSp3, 1GB RAM. Process Explorer reports approx. 225k Private bytes/422k Virtual size. Fully 448MB of free RAM is available. CleanMem is set to run every 6 hours. System response is 'snappy'.

HTH, Thanks for your insightful analysis and the program link.

@mthhtm

mmm... wondering which aging rock star you might have had in mind. Meat Loaf, Keith Richards, Gary Glitter, Elvis....

Thanks! I appreciate your suggestion of CleanMem. I have given CleanMem a try one one Windoze box thus far and it seems to as you claim. Of course, it would be of no help in Linux, where I do 95%+ of my work. I'm currently having an absolutely infuriating experience with 10.60 at this moment on the two machines described above. I have found that there is one workaround. That would be to exit Opera and restart. Woe be unto the Opera devs when they reach the programmers entrance to heaven if they expect an exit/restart from here on out to be the panacea for this hellish nightmare.

P.S. Installed CleanMem 18 hours ago. I have 6 unexciting tabs open in Opera and 12 moderately exciting tabs open in F***f*x as I type this on Opera 10.6, WinXPSp3, P4-2.66, 1GB RAM. Process Explorer reports approx. 241k Private bytes/476k Virtual size. Fully 619MB of free RAM is available. CleanMem is set to run every .5 hours (a default upon installation? may change this later). System response is 'acceptable'. However, typically I will have 20-50 tabs open in 2+ windows. We'll see what happens in a few hours when I approach my usual Opera state, open other standby apps, and actually start doing something.

Cleanmem stats: 7/12/2010 11:23:37 AM
Process monitored - Memory usage - PID - Process path
--------------------------------------------------------------
opera.exe, 426.51 MB ==> 7.04 MB, PID: 3968
"E:\Program Files\Opera\opera.exe"
--------------------------------------------------------------

@dicktater:

I had Ronnie Wood in mind actually. He gets more scary with every passing year. Btw, I did try to send a reply to your PM but Opera rejected it saying you had personal messages turned off.

opera ever since with the "10.x" release decided to trade off "memory usage" with performance and horsepower...Even thought my opera is currently using about 252 MB RAM I still have a total of 3 GB which no where near touches the max...so I am fine. btw minimizing opera reduces RAM usage and closing tabs as well. Opera has a sophisticated RAM management where it will give back RAM to other apps that need it and take when RAM is free.

Originally posted by samMD:

opera ever since with the "10.x" release decided to trade off "memory usage" with performance and horsepower...Even thought my opera is currently using about 252 MB RAM I still have a total of 3 GB which no where near touches the max...so I am fine. btw minimizing opera reduces RAM usage and closing tabs as well. Opera has a sophisticated RAM management where it will give back RAM to other apps that need it and take when RAM is free.

Year. Bubblegum tastes nice. But actually, the Opera world isn't even close to that perfect picture you are drawing. It's right, Opera reduces RAM when closing tabs, but the RAM management isn't as sophisticated as you might think. Actually, when using Opera heavily, so with more than 20 tabs open (what many of us have), Opera consumes way more than a few hundred MBs of RAM. And when Opera uses all the RAM there is (what happend to me on a 2 GB machine with almost no other programms running), it takes ages for other programms to start (or function). The RAM management of Opera 10 might be planned to be sophisticated, but in fact it's mostly unreasonable.

@ mthhtm

Yeah, Ronnie is looking rather a lot like an old lady these days.

http://images.contactmusic.com/newsimages/ronnie_wood_1121326.jpg

http://static.thehollywoodgossip.com/images/gallery/ronnie-wood_344x344.jpg

@Toowong- Still RAM is meant to be consumed...and since computing is becoming cheaper it is safe to make applications that focus on features and raw horsepower , performance, and visual aesthetics. Opera used to focus (before version 10) on memory footprint and app. size. They rethought and saw firefox 3.x , chrome coming in IE8..computing, and the current opera version and how it stood and rethought there strategy which I thought was a smart decision , earlier today I downloaded opera 9.64 just to see how big of a difference todays version from the past version is. Its pretty substantial, I am really not used to waiting anymore in opera 10.60 as everything is instantly "fed" to me, because of everything in opera operates and blistering speeds. BUT still is not bloated and slow as Firefox, and operates at the same "fluid motion" as Chrome

Originally posted by samMD:

BUT still is not bloated and slow as Firefox, and operates at the same "fluid motion" as Chrome

that's more or less an opinion.

Originally posted by samMD:

Still RAM is meant to be consumed...

it is also meant to be released once tabs are closed. as the users are reporting, Opera doesn't release RAM when tabs are closed.

Originally posted by samMD:

opera ever since with the "10.x" release decided to trade off "memory usage" with performance and horsepower...Even thought my opera is currently using about 252 MB RAM I still have a total of 3 GB which no where near touches the max...so I am fine. btw minimizing opera reduces RAM usage and closing tabs as well. Opera has a sophisticated RAM management where it will give back RAM to other apps that need it and take when RAM is free.

It's an issue when I get error messages from my system saying that the Virtual Memory (page file) needs to be expanded in order for windows to continue running. It's also and issue when other programs need memory but Opera won't give it and so memory exceptions get thrown and other programs on my computer silently crash.

Originally posted by samMD:

@Toowong- Still RAM is meant to be consumed...and since computing is becoming cheaper it is safe to make applications that focus on features and raw horsepower , performance, and visual aesthetics.

year, RAM is meant to be consumed, but not all by one simple application (an internet browser...). And in the second Opera slows down my machine, it uses way to much RAM. And yes, RAM might be cheap nowadays, but I think 2 GB should be enough for most systems out there. Cause when its not, things get a lot "less cheap". Time is money - and I don't want to switch to 64bit and buy me another 4 GB of RAM just to use an internet browser. Come on - Opera uses 5 times more RAM than most up-to-date-computer-games... I experienced RAM-issues before - in Photoshop, when handling pictures that where like 25.000 x 10.000 pixels - thats a wooping 250 Megapixels - but an internet browser? Sry, but I just have no comprehension on why an internet browser needs more than 1.5 GB of RAM. There is just no point.

Originally posted by samMD:

I downloaded opera 9.64 just to see how big of a difference todays version from the past version is. Its pretty substantial, I am really not used to waiting anymore in opera 10.60 as everything is instantly "fed" to me, because of everything in opera operates and blistering speeds.

As a long time Opera user I have never experienced speed-issues with Opera ever. It allways used to be a very fast browser. But today, wenn Opera stuffs all that useless jung inside the RAM, even opening the favs inside Opera takes ages. Or even deleting parts of the history takes like 5 seconds - 5 seconds - thats a hell of a long time... Opera is far from "faster" now...

Originally posted by samMD:

opera ever since with the "10.x" release decided to trade off "memory usage" with performance and horsepower...

The higher memory usage became appreciable since 10.5x, for me at least and probably most of the rest.

Originally posted by samMD:

Opera has a sophisticated RAM management where it will give back RAM to other apps

Is this your own experience or are you just 'citing'?

Originally posted by Toowong:

But today, wenn Opera stuffs all that useless jung inside the RAM, even opening the favs inside Opera takes ages. Or even deleting parts of the history takes like 5 seconds - 5 seconds - thats a hell of a long time... Opera is far from "faster" now...

I have the same issue with Opera 10.60 (code name "Nanny") taking a long time to open bookmarks. I have had Opera take a long as 5 minutes to display the Add Bookmark dialog box. The wait seems to be dependent on number of tabs open and how long Opera has been in session. I believe that this might be due, in large part, to Opera scanning the bookmarks file looking for a duplicate. If a duplicate is found, Opera will offer a the very different, and inanely limited, Bookmark Properties dialog box rather than the standard Add Bookmark dialog box. I believe that if we had the ability to deactivate scanning for duplicates when adding bookmarks (leave me alone Nanny), it would be a start toward bringing Opera's behavior and speed closer back to normal.

User mthhtm provided some information about nifty a memory utility that can be a useful weapon for Windoze ewesers experiencing Opera memory theft. Read about it here:

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/findpost.pl?id=6177402

Theft (of memory) is wrong! Fortunately. this utility periodically snatches back some of the memory Opera for Windoze steals.

Sadly, I know of no such defense for Linux at this time.

Sadly CleanMem doesn't work on Opera, it only cause Opera to freeze every 30 minutes & doesn't reduce the VM at all...

Originally posted by Krake:

Is this your own experience or are you just 'citing'?

citing..tips given by opera devs how to lower consumed RAM

Originally posted by samMD:

citing..tips given by opera devs how to lower consumed RAM

please provide reference. thanks.

they were posts in different forums..search around and you shall find them

200–300 MB RAM usage seems fairly normal to me for Web browsers these days. IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome... they are all resource hungry because of the media-rich sites around now.

I have 1.5 GB of RAM and often have Firefox and Opera open with a dozen or so tabs at the same time and memory is not a problem on my old system.

@ dude09:

It's a shame you're having problems on your system. I have both OPERA 10.6 and Outlook 2007 running all the time from the moment I power up and often run FF simultaneously because of Opera's inability to copy rich text. This is on a humble 2.88 MHz Pentium 4, 1 GB Ram, XP SP3 system with integrated graphics. I can't say that I've noticed the freeze-up that you report here so it's quite puzzling. What system configuration are you running?

Originally posted by mthhtm:

What system configuration are you running?

2.99GHz, Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM, XP SP2

The freeze happened every time when CleanMem is trying to clean up memory in the background, the cleanmem log for opera.exe shows that there are decreased in memory usage, but task manager shows no differences in both RAM & VM...

The difference in the amount of physical RAM between our otherwise similar systems does stick out like a sore thumb. Only half a GB is pretty much borderline for a system running XP don't you think? The OS alone would swallow up half of available memory. You wouldn't be able to run more than 2 of today's bloated apps (especially anti-virus programs) without the system overloading and paging in and out like crazy. It sounds like that is what would freeze your system with or without CleanMem.

Some time ago I had access to a basic 4-year old Sony all-in-one entertainment system running XP SP3 (without CleanMem) which also had only half a Gig of RAM and a Pentium 4. They tried to make up for lack of RAM by running the CPU at 3.4 GHz but it was still painfully laggy and the HDD never stopped thrashing with the amount of paging that was going on. Do you notice this effect on your system?

Would it be impossible for you to increase your RAM? That is likely to be the most cost-effective answer.

Yeah still have problems with memory, specially virtual memory not being released.

By the way,opera:memdebug gives some interesting results for me. Does anybody want to share results?

Mine are as follow:

                      used              max          percent
Documents        501325 kB         50000 kB             1002
Images            47996 kB         50000 kB               95
EcmaScript       254208 kB          2000 kB            12710
Disk Cache         9675 kB	   20000 kB               48
RAM Cache          2373 kB          1024 kB              231

Originally posted by mthhtm:

Do you notice this effect on your system?

In Opera 10.5x onward, yes it lag like crazy after awhile of usage. But Opera 10.10 is OK, Opera 9.x series have no problem even after running for the entire day. If we are talking about other application then it's a different story, Photoshop can easily max out a PC loaded with 4GB of RAM.

Originally posted by mthhtm:

Would it be impossible for you to increase your RAM?

I could spend some $$$ on an old PC but... (read next reply)

Originally posted by mthhtm:

That is likely to be the most cost-effective answer.

Instead of upgrade my 4 years old DELL dimension 3100, it would be more practical to just buy a "modern" PC that can keep up with the increasingly bloated softwares these days. And keep the old one as "secondary helper" beside the new one. I guess it's time to shop for a new PC...

But seriously, Opera 10.5/6 is showing similar symptoms (memory leak/fragmentation) as Firefox a few years back. IMHO it's not the ancient PC or lack of RAM, it's the software that need fixes because those with a ton of RAM also note that Opera consume too much RAM & VM after a long period of usage.

Originally posted by dude09:

Instead of upgrade my 4 years old DELL dimension 3100, it would be more practical to just buy a "modern" PC that can keep up with the increasingly bloated softwares these days.

crucial.com has 2GB (2X1GB) matched pair of PC2-5300 memory modules to max out your machine for only $50. You could save some dough and keep running XP and/or install a really nice Linux distro instead of moving to Windoze 7. Unless, of course, you just have an uncontrollable urge to contribute to Bill and Melinda Gates' eugenics programs.

<a href="http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=db38378fa5ca7304&cpe=datafeedus&zmap=ct907900&zmac=40&zmas=1&zmam=13262493">crucial memory for dimension 3100</a>

Originally posted by tomshardware.com:

-39 Tabs

After closing all 39 additional tabs, leaving only Google open in a single tab, Google's Chrome returns nearly all of the previously-used system memory. Chrome only holds onto ten megabytes of excess RAM from the 39 closed tabs. This memory management is nothing short of exceptional. No other Web browser returns this amount of system memory after having so many tabs open. Even Firefox, which uses the least memory with a full load of tabs by far, returns less memory than Chrome (both in amount and in percentage). Firefox uses the second least amount of memory after closing 39 tabs, but only really returns half, holding onto 80 MB more than it had before the additional tabs were opened. Internet Explorer manages to surprise yet again, giving back three quarters of the 40-tab total. Safari also gives back three quarters of its 40-tab memory total, but that still puts it at 270 MB. Opera performs the worst in this arena, keeping over 350 megabytes after closing 39 of the forty tabs. Not only is this the largest amount of memory that a browser holds onto, but it is half of Opera's 40-tab total.

that's a quote from recent THG browser test.

Originally posted by c69:

Opera performs the worst in this arena, keeping over 350 megabytes after closing 39 of the forty tabs. Not only is this the largest amount of memory that a browser holds onto, but it is half of Opera's 40-tab total.

Will this finally mute some of the Opera apologists who frequently insist that Opera is not a frickin' memory pig and a half?

Originally posted by dicktater:

Will this finally mute some of the Opera apologists who frequently insist that Opera is not a frickin' memory pig and a half?

No. There will be always some apologists keep saying IT'S A FEATURE, the browser will ONLY use 10% of RAM, & Opera will release the memory when other application need it.... blah, blah, blah.

If these people keep repeating it, it will eventually turn into a slogan.

Originally posted by dude09:

Opera will release the memory when other application need it.... b\

If these people keep repeating it, it will eventually turn into a slogan.

Well that does happen here always, unless there's a leak. than it doesn't do that.

People here, are just shouting how much Opera is using. I don't see many users trying to find memory leaks.
Stating that Opera using to MUCH isn't really helpfull ,.
If you open 30 sites, and you'll see memory continue to rise, than one of them leaks.
Find that one, and report it

People here, are just shouting how much Opera is using. I don't see many users trying to find memory leaks.
Stating that Opera using to MUCH isn't really helpfull ,.
If you open 30 sites, and you'll see memory continue to rise, than one of them leaks.
Find that one, and report it

We are users, not beta testers. People just want to browse, not look for bugs. They do not get paid for such a job.

Originally posted by ytsmabeer:

Well that does happen here always, unless there's a leak. than it doesn't do that.

Did you read most of the posts in this thread yet?

Originally posted by ytsmabeer:

I don't see many users trying to find memory leaks.

We are no software developers, & have no access to the source code of Opera.
Also, Opera is not open source project, & user are not lab rats.

Originally posted by ytsmabeer:

Find that one, and report it

I did that for too many times that I'm sick of it, I would gladly do it frequently if I witness some result. I reported Gametrailers.com, Kotaku.com, Youtube.com, & many many more websites that cause RAM & VM spikes months ago.
I'm still waiting for result & improvement...

Well well well: This happens to me 2-4 times every day:
opera_fail.png

Since 10.50 opening "too much" tabs (18+/-), and then opera comsumes all the memory (I have only 900)
and all the other programs does not respond

Opera itself does not respond, and it does not release the memory for others programs

I have just upgraded to Opera 10.6 due to a bug with the opacity CSS3 property (which is unfortunately unsolved in 10.6). Will see what about memory usage here...

Originally posted by dicktater:

Will this finally mute some of the Opera apologists who frequently insist that Opera is not a frickin' memory pig and a half?

Why would ignorant remarks from someone who is clueless about memory usage mute people who make perfectly factual and reasonable remarks about it?

In fact, most complaints in this thread are people who think perfectly reasonable memory usage is "too much" for some people who haven't a clue what they are talking about. Just look at the first and second posts. In the first one, Opera is using a mere 16% of his total RAM!

In other words: This whole thread was started based on fallacies and ignorance.

Fail.

Originally posted by prd3:

In fact, most complaints in this thread are people who think perfectly reasonable memory usage is "too much" for some people who haven't a clue what they are talking about. Just look at the first and second posts. In the first one, Opera is using a mere 16% of his total RAM!

In other words: This whole thread was started based on fallacies and ignorance.

Fail.

Do you think I and other are dreaming when we see 95% or 100% memory usage (1G allocated on a machine holding a total of 1G RAM), with whole system slowed down by swapping, while Opera is the only one application opened at that time ? Do you think the clock was suddenly running faster when some peoples noticed Opera sometime requires 20 minutes to shut down (all that time to free memory step by step)

Why do you think there is an automatic bug report feature to report bugs to Opera team when Opera crash if there were not any bugs in Opera ?

About what a normal memory consumption is : I'm afraid just a very few people have an idea of what 64KB, 1M, 1G means. 1G is enormous, this is enough to load as much as 500 instances of an office application in Windows 3.1.... to display three web page ? This is unfortunately how software goes : consuming always more and more memory, more and more CPU, this is never enough. My guess is that in the five comings years, 1G gonna be just insufficient to display a single web page.

That is not dreaming is not fallacies or ignorance, what would be fallacies or ignorance, would be to ignore how much applications resources consumption increase. What was sufficient 15 years ago to load 200 or 300 instances of a full OS with multiple application opened, is just now insufficient to load a single page. Tomorrow, you will need 200 or 300 times your highest memory consumption of today to display a single page. You don't believe it ? just wait and see.... or just look at the past and look at how things evolved. If you ignore this, that is the fallacies.

And believe me, I know what 64KB means, as well a 1M or 1G.

Originally posted by prd3:

Originally posted by dicktater:

Will this finally mute some of the Opera apologists who frequently insist that Opera is not a frickin' memory pig and a half?

Why would ignorant remarks from someone who is clueless about memory usage mute people who make perfectly factual and reasonable remarks about it?

In fact, most complaints in this thread are people who think perfectly reasonable memory usage is "too much" for some people who haven't a clue what they are talking about. Just look at the first and second posts. In the first one, Opera is using a mere 16% of his total RAM!

In other words: This whole thread was started based on fallacies and ignorance.

Fail.

I really get angry, when I read stuff like that... As said: On my 2 GB machine, Opera sometimes consumes around 1.6 GB of RAM. Combine that with Vista (and Aero), a few basic background programms, like my anti virus program or steam, and I've got 100% memory usage. Opera just takes whats there - every little bit. And that makes my 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM virtually unusable.

And remember, we're talking about an INTERNET BROWSER! Just for instance: Photoshop CS consumes way less RAM than that, no matter what I do. Of course, Photoshop shurely is hungry for more when I do some serious work with it, but I rather found my CPU limiting the speed of Photoshop than my RAM. Sure, Opera uses less RAM, when I open less tabs, but really: What has chanced in half a year, that my browser now needs four or five times as much RAM for the exact same websites, than half a year ago?

Originally posted by Toowong:

Opera sometimes consumes around 1.6 GB of RAM

You clearly came accross a site or plugin that leaks memory.
Any site with silverlight by any change?

Originally posted by Hibou57:

Do you think I and other are dreaming when we see 95% or 100% memory usage

Very, very few people have this problem. Those that do should report bugs instead of incessantly whining about memory usage and pretend that it's a widespread problem.

My point is that people are completely ignorant about memory usage, and draw conclusions based on their own ignorance. This thread was started based on a fallacy, and has created an echo chamber of idiocy where ignorant people are getting each other more and more excited about this "problem", which wasn' even a real problem for the thread starter.

So while a few people may be having problems, it is not as widespread as the whining in this thread would have you believe.

Why do you think there is an automatic bug report feature to report bugs to Opera team when Opera crash if there were not any bugs in Opera ?

Who said anything about there being no bugs in Opera?

This is unfortunately how software goes : consuming always more and more memory, more and more CPU, this is never enough. My guess is that in the five comings years, 1G gonna be just insufficient to display a single web page.

See? This is what I'm talking about. You are just shouting in the Echo Chamber of Ignorance. Of course browsers are going to require more and more memory. Browsers themselves and the web are both getting increasingly complex!

That is not dreaming is not fallacies or ignorance, what would be fallacies or ignorance, would be to ignore how much applications resources consumption increase. What was sufficient 15 years ago to load 200 or 300 instances of a full OS with multiple application opened, is just now insufficient to load a single page.

So you are saying that pages today, and the technologies supported by browsers, aren't much more complex than 15 years ago? I'd like to see you run 3D games in a browser 15 years ago...

Tomorrow, you will need 200 or 300 times your highest memory consumption of today to display a single page. You don't believe it ? just wait and see.... or just look at the past and look at how things evolved. If you ignore this, that is the fallacies.

No, system requirements will increase, but not because browsers are becoming bloated. It will increase because the complexity of the web will increase, just as it has so far.

Originally posted by Toowong:

As said: On my 2 GB machine, Opera sometimes consumes around 1.6 GB of RAM.

So? That still doesn't change the fact that the thread starter only thinks he has a problem, and so do most people who post about "memory problems." Your problem might be real, but the vast majority of posts about "memory problems" are not actual problems. It is not as widespread as this echo chamber of ignorance would have you believe.

And remember, we're talking about an INTERNET BROWSER!

Yes, one of the most complex applications on your computer. That's what we're talking about.

Just for instance: Photoshop CS consumes way less RAM than that, no matter what I do.

So? This is just another fallacy. You are assuming that Photoshop is so much more complex than a browser, but the fact is that while Photoshop works in a relatively controlled environment with mostly predictable input and output, browsers have to handle wildly complex situations, including completely unknown and random input and output. And I haven't even gotten into the massive amounts of workarounds for bugs on web pages.

What has chanced in half a year, that my browser now needs four or five times as much RAM for the exact same websites, than half a year ago?

Both browsers and web sites are getting more complex. Browsers support more and more web stuff, and pages use more and more of it.

Originally posted by e-berlin:

Man, you're 100% right, that's my opinion also. Let's hope someone from Opera's dev team actually reads this forum.

Nope. He is a 100% wrong. A lite version of Opera would not reduce memory use, and yes, the developers do read this forum, so they know that the same nonsense has been repeated many times before.

This thread has outlived its usefulness. There are too many unrelated issues in the same thread. Several factors will increase RAM usage. Without specific information, a general statement that Opera is using too much memory is meaningless.

Originally posted by Pesala:

This thread has outlived its usefulness. There are too many unrelated issues in the same thread. Several factors will increase RAM usage. Without specific information, a general statement that Opera is using too much memory is meaningless.

You are right about the request for more detailed context information.

Sometime it seems unpredictable to me. Right now, memory usage is 240 M, highest is 241 M with 10 tabs, while it happens I saw 1G with 3 tabs.

Surely the number of tabs opened is not so much relevant. May be this would be useful to have statistics about what lived during a cession : how many HTML content received, how many tabs opened and closed, how many video reports viewed on DailyMotion, what was the weight of all of the video streams, amount of memory used by JavaScript applications or widgets, etc, etc. And in the large, when that memory which is not freed was allocated and and by what ?

But I do not know a way to have such runtime logs with Opera.

Originally posted by Pesala:

Without specific information, a general statement that Opera is using too much memory is meaningless.

Then why don't you do us all good favour and compile a list of specific items of useful information for users to compile that would facilitate our understanding of Opera's ridiculously gluttonous memory usage? Please be sure to include ALL of the items you deem necessary to being meaningful. Hey, you could even start a new thread, one that has yet to lead a useful life.

Originally posted by dicktater:

Then why don't you do us all good favour and compile a list of specific items of useful information for users to compile that would facilitate our understanding of Opera's ridiculously gluttonous memory usage?

Opera doesn't have "ridiculously gluttonous memory usage". So general comments like that are completely useless, not to mention dishonest and misleading. The only way to discuss this is to look at each person's specific case, figure out if the memory usage is out of control (which it usually isn't, but is assumed to be, as I have demonstrated), and only then look at what caused that in that specific case.

Originally posted by dicktater:

Hey, you could even start a new thread, one that has yet to lead a useful life.

It already exists in the forum posting rules at the top of the forum.

5. Include all relevant information. Describe the problem briefly, but completely. Include the full error message, if any. If you are having problems with a page, include the exact URL and explain what the problem is and how it can be reproduced. List your operating system, system specs (CPU, RAM, etc.), and so on.

I assume that you can decide what is relevant information, and what is not, hinted at by the phrase "and so on," but to summarize some things that may be relevant:

1. Your system specs: OS, Opera version, installed RAM, CPU speed, graphics card/chip and monitor resolution
2. The number of tabs currently open
3. Memory use reported
4. The URL of every tab open (vital)
5. Plugin versions used, e.g. for flash and pdf.
6. How long Opera has been running when the problem occurs
7. Memory and disk cache settings.
8. Other major applications currently running and memory used by them.
9. Are you browsing from behind a proxy?
10. Is Opera Turbo on, off or auto?
11. I Opera link enabled? Active/inactive?
12. What was your experience? If Opera froze, how long for? If it crashed, what did you do just before it crashed?

why not turn this thread into a poll? see how many think memory consumption is unacceptable..

Originally posted by rushad0:

why not turn this thread into a poll? see how many think memory consumption is unacceptable..

For ten or twenty guys/girls voting among thousand or million of Opera users ? Not meaningful...

For ten or twenty guys/girls voting among thousand or million of Opera users ? Not meaningful...

However, there is no need for every Opera user to vote. Statisticians usually survey some people and interpolate the results for the whole group. Though, of course, it's not clear how valid will sampling be if it's done on this forum.

Originally posted by Hibou57:

For ten or twenty guys/girls voting among thousand or million of Opera users ? Not meaningful...

still wouldn't hurt to have some sort of count on opinions

Originally posted by Kropotkin2:

However, there is no need for every Opera user to vote. Statisticians usually survey some people and interpolate the results for the whole group. Though, of course, it's not clear how valid will sampling be if it's done on this forum.

You're right, and as you said in the end, it's all about relevancy. Remember about browser usage statistics from W3C.org; which are clearly different than that of the one you may get on a “normal” website. As an example, I still have 15 to 18% users of IE6, while W3C stats says IE6 has disappeared and no body use it anymore.


To get back to the topic, it has reached again 1G today. I suspect video here, while I did not watched any video... I just get to DailyMotion to search for a report about astronomy. As usually, when you arrive on a page, the video starts automatically, even if you go back right after. I had multiple page like this.

May be it is buffering something even if you don't use it and leaved the page ?

Will have to run a test of this kind later.

Since I'm still using Opera 9.x while I wait for version 10 to sound stable enough to use, I was wondering if the memory overload that Opera 10.x has been having only affects those that use tabs.
I don't use tabs (well I do at work but not at home but I'm not looking to "upgrade" the one at work since they don't allow you to install Opera at work... you sort have to work around the security restrictions to get it on the machine) so I was wondering if having multiple windows open is as much of a memory hog. All the speed tests have used tabs as the constraint in their results. I don't see anything about opening a bunch of windows and then closing them down to 1 and seeing what memory is in use.

I'll try to leave my home pc on or use hibernate as much as possible so I'm going to see what 9.x does on the memory side of things after I leave it up for a while. I would check now but since Windows 7 crashes more often than Windows XP, I can't do that right now since I had to restart it recently. I've never paid attention to the memory usage but I'm curious as to what it's doing given how people are complaining about Opera 10.x.

Originally posted by Hibou57:

Remember about browser usage statistics from W3C.org;

What stats for w3c.org? It's called w3.org, and you are probably talking about w3schools, which is not part of the W3C.

Originally posted by bdot:

Since I'm still using Opera 9.x while I wait for version 10 to sound stable enough to use, I was wondering if the memory overload that Opera 10.x has been having only affects those that use tabs.

If you are going to wait until no one is having problems, you will never upgrade. Someone will always be having problems.

Originally posted by rushad0:

still wouldn't hurt to have some sort of count on opinions

Yes, it would definitely hurt. You see, people are ignorant, and jump to bogus conclusions because they make too many false assumptions.

Originally posted by prd3:

Yes, it would definitely hurt. You see, people are ignorant, and jump to bogus conclusions because they make too many false assumptions.

that surely isn't encouraging to call your product users ignorant. all concerns and comments should be treated with respect.

please be more receptive to people's complaints or concerns. obviously there is 'something' wrong with memory usage or memory management in Opera. otherwise, there wouldn't be so much interest in this forum thread. this thread already has close to 300 responses and is one of the most viewed.

Originally posted by rushad0:

obviously there is 'something' wrong with memory usage or memory management in Opera

There may be, but if there is, useless threads like this or even more useless polls, won't help to discover the bugs that do cause memory leaks. Vague and unsupported comments about "huge memory use" without any info about installed RAM, number of tabs open, etc., don't help anyone.

It seems the latest 10.61 RC2 released note mentioned about "Fixed a few memory leaks", let's hope these fixed all the high memory usage problem.

@ prd3

Please stop trolling, & don't be like a jerk.