Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Internet Explorer memory problems?

I have been using Internet Explorer 7 since the first public beta was released ages ago and before I complain about it I would like to point out to everyone the future is tabbed work spaces, firefox/opera etc have been doin it for awhile and I am glad microsoft have built this feature in.

The problem stems from the amount of memory IE7 uses, not sure why but after a day of having the same internet explorer window open my laptop starts to go into arrest and needs to be rebooted, after poking around in task manager it seems that IE7 was using around 300mb of memory even at startup it cranks along with 40mb?
Seems I am no the only one fellow blogger - Robert Scoble(http://scobleizer.com/2006/10/21/the-great-firefox-2-vs-ie-7-memory-test/ ) has found the same problem, no fix has been released, and looks like Microsoft has been quiet on admitting the problem.

I am guessing the the problem maybe that IE7 is written to work natively with windows vista and has been reverse engineered to work under XP SP2?
And as the two operating systems are work vastly different with regards to memory and how it is cleaned up.

I have installed for development purposes .net Famework 1.0 / 2.0 and the 3.0 Beta, not sure if this has any effect on the memory usage for IE7 though.

My advice to anyone in the IT world who looks after more than a few machines (especially if you have winsdows update on set to auto), be careful or if its too late to advise users to closedown internat explorer every now and then.

I will keep this post updated if I find any fixes, hope it helped.

cheers

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