possible to improve windows 10 memory leaks?

Granted every version of windows has seemed to get choked by excessive browser tabs. And I'll grant that my windows 10 install (old... v 1909) only has 8 gig of RAM, which never seems to hicup, until about a week. I do mostly use Firefox and Chrome which are both seasoned browsers so I'd like to think their internal memory management coding properly releases memory no longer in use. But still, once I have a dozen browser tabs open and in use, its just a matter of days before they system starts choking, with browser tabs crashing and reporting "not enough memory". The only thing that has helped was to manually increase the size of the windows swap file, which I now have set to about 16 gb. Anything else I can do?

SIDE NOTE: Yes, I intend to update my windows version, but its is older machine with some old but still high quality peripherals, like an older professional sound card, and version update almost always mean re-installing any drivers which microsoft can't find a current newer version for. That plus having to re-install print drivers and other utilities. So bottom line, I usually have to plan on a days work when I attempt upgrade, and it often fails and reverts (probably because of the age of the machine)

If there really and truly are any memory leaks, there's not likely to be anything that you could do about it. That would have to be something fixed in the leaky code. If you somehow knew exactly what was causing the issue, then there might be something you could do about it.

As for upgrading Windows...

One strategy that you might consider is to simply create a full disk image backup just before upgrading to the latest version of Win 10. That would allow you to trial run the latest updates and easily roll back in case things don't work well. Note that you should be able to roll back anyway right from Windows itself, but having a full image would give you that extra level of protection.

hsehestedt said:

If there really and truly are any memory leaks, there's not likely to be anything that you could do about it. That would have to be something fixed in the leaky code. If you somehow knew exactly what was causing the issue, then there might be something you could do about it.

As for upgrading Windows...

One strategy that you might consider is to simply create a full disk image backup just before upgrading to the latest version of Win 10. That would allow you to trial run the latest updates and easily roll back in case things don't work well. Note that you should be able to roll back anyway right from Windows itself, but having a full image would give you that extra level of protection.

Thanks, and yes... I usually go a step further and just clone (and fully test!) the whole system drive before any major upgrade, or even a major software install I'm not sure I fully trust.

Darn though! I'd hoped by now Microsoft might have released a "garbage collection" tool. Something like a virtual machine or wrapper to run possibly leaky code in, so when things get fluky I could just shout down and restart the VM instance instead of rebooting the whole machine.

I'll be curious though to see if others have the same problem with either of these well seasoned browsers!

PeterPan2000 said:

Thanks, and yes... I usually go a step further and just clone (and fully test!) the whole system drive before any major upgrade, or even a major software install I'm not sure I fully trust.

Darn though! I'd hoped by now Microsoft might have released a "garbage collection" tool. Something like a virtual machine or wrapper to run possibly leaky code in, so when things get fluky I could just shout down and restart the VM instance instead of rebooting the whole machine.

I'll be curious though to see if others have the same problem with either of these well seasoned browsers!

The problem is this: How is Windows supposed to know if an application has a memory leak? Maybe the memory that it is consuming is being used on purpose. It's hard for the OS to know what is normal memory usage for an app vs some abnormal state. That would really need to be something that gets fixed by the maker of the app.

Just out of curiosity, have you performed any sort of monitoring to verify that it does indeed seem to be a memory leak? I realize that you are getting messages indicating not enough memory, but have you brought up something like Task Manager to verify that it is actually the browser consuming the memory

I often run 50+ tabs simultaneously in Edge with not a single problem ever. Admittedly, that's not with 8GB.

Precisely this ...

hsehestedt said:

The problem is this: How is Windows supposed to know if an application has a memory leak? Maybe the memory that it is consuming is being used on purpose. It's hard for the OS to know what is normal memory usage for an app vs some abnormal state. That would really need to be something that gets fixed by the maker of the app.

Your memory leaks is not a Windows memory leak. It's a browser leak.
Only Google (for Chrome) or Mozilla (for Firefox) can fix their leaks.

And increasing (so-called) virtual memory is not a solution.

Easy solution: Close the browser. Then reopen.

BTW ... I have either (a) no memory leaks or (b) no leaks large enough to cause a problem.
But that might be because I don't open dozens of tabs, and I don't leave a browser open for long periods.

I do not use Firefox tabs as a way of storage. Interesting URL's are stored in folders on my desktop in a logical order, and are only used in FF when needed.
Never had a problem with memory leaks.