Recently I have noticed that if I leave my computer on, or my wife leaves her computer on and we have a browser up with a social networking site running (read: facebook), after a wile, likely overnight, our browsers and sometimes the computer itself will windup doing a faceplant… needing to be rebooted.
It seems that facebook is constantly polling their servers, this is causing a massive memory leak. Most likely due to programming that isn’t done with people leaving the app up all the time in mind. So most recently I have taken to look at facebook and then closing the browser, or browser tab. A little inconvenient, but I hate walking up to my machine and seeing it ‘freak’ out or hang, or my now favorite term for it – faceplanting.
Plus, I don’t feel comfortable with a web app that is constantly communicating back to the server ALL the time. Not that I am paranoid that they are scanning my computer and reading all the information on it, but it’s not exactly SECURE to leave web apps like that up and running all the time…
Hell, it’s a free application, it works nearly all the time and isn’t that bad really… who’s to complain? I just thought it was something interesting to blog about… wonder if I’m the only one having that issue.
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1 Comment to 'A social-networking site causing computer to faceplant!'
February 16, 2010
In looking at google for facebook memory leaks, it seems that this has been going on for a LONG time. It also seems that facebook has not made any corrections to it’s code, nor does it plan on it. If there are comments that are over a year old, and the same problem exists, that’s a signal that they may feel it is a problem, but a problem that users can, will and have lived with.
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