The other day my computer told me I was low on memory. I checked C: drive and it was like 100MB free.
I rebooted and there were 10GB free.
Then I used Firefox for awhile and it was down to 100MB free.
I'm not downloading anything.
Why does the harddrive disk space get used up while using Firefox?
The more tabs you have open, the more memory Firefox will use.
I have 7 tabs open, and Firefox is using just over than 500MB of memory.
It would take about 135 tabs open, to use 10GB of Memory.
So if you don't have 135 tabs open, you either have a severe memory leak in Firefox, or some kind of infection.
Like if some hacker on the internet was using your Firefox to mine bitcoins (called a crypto miner).
Hello ironfist,
How much RAM does your PC have and how do you have paging file set? Manage Virtual Memory Pagefile in Windows 10
In my experience, best to set paging file to system managed.
Depending on how many tabs you have open in Firefox, etc that will cause RAM usage and potentially paging file usage to go up.
If you pay careful attention to the OP's post, though they mention "memory" the issue they describe is actually storage space"
That said, I don't use Firefox so I can't speak to it, but something sounds odd where the OP states, they're down to 100mb of storage space, until rebooting where it then shows 10gig of free space only to drop down to 100mb again when using Firefox.
In short, even though the OP states memory, the issue appears to be storage space. With that, I'd ask to OP to provide a screen shot of their OS drive.
I thought so too! I just wanted to make sure I was speed-scanning somewhat correctly :) Steve108's post also mentioned PC memory, HDD's paging file, Windows' settings of said paging file. Getting back to HDD -- [recalling the first opening] 10GB free byte-space on HDD, would that not be very close to not having enough free byte-space for Windows to efficiently operate?
hey guys, yes, I am talking storage space. I had about 100 firefox tabs open.
I didn't know software used storage locations. I figured 100gb free was 100gb free unless you downloaded files.
But yes, my harddrive had 10G free, then I used Firefox for a while and my computer got really slow and there was a message saying "free up some hard drive space" and then I checked and there were 100mb fee. After I rebooted, I was back to 10G.
"I didn't know software used storage locations. "
Virtually every application will use storage space on your HDD/SSD.
In most cases that will be temporary e.g. When you print something a temporary printing file is made, or using Word will make temporary files.
All Web Browsers use very large amounts of caches which is increased by having a large number of Tabs open, easily many GB of data.
All together this can easily approach the 10 GB or 100 GB you are seeing.
That is why it is recommended at least 20% of your HDD/SSD should always be free space. That means always buying an HDD/SSD much larger than you think you need.
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