Selenium WebDriver Consumes 19,000 MB of Memory.. Takes 10 min to Launch Firefox - selenium

Question

I'm using the following code to launch Selenium WebDriver:
public static WebDriver launchWebDriver(String ipAddress, String port)
{
System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "PATH_TO_GECKO_DRIVER");
String firefoxInstallationFolder = "PATH_TO_FIREFOX_INSTALLATION_FOLDER";
File firefoxProfileFile = new File(firefoxInstallationFolder);
FirefoxProfile firefoxProfile = new FirefoxProfile(firefoxProfileFile);
firefoxProfile.setPreference("datareporting.policy.dataSubmissionPolicyAccepted", false);
firefoxProfile.setPreference("dom.max_chrome_script_run_time", 0);
firefoxProfile.setPreference("dom.max_script_run_time", 0);
firefoxProfile.setPreference("media.peerconnection.enabled", false);
FirefoxOptions firefoxOptions = new FirefoxOptions();
firefoxOptions.setProfile(firefoxProfile);
firefoxOptions.addPreference("dom.popup_maximum", 200);
firefoxOptions.addPreference("dom.webnotifications.enabled", false);
firefoxOptions.addPreference("media.peerconnection.enabled", false);
firefoxOptions.addPreference("general.useragent.override", "CUSTOM_UA");
DesiredCapabilities dc = DesiredCapabilities.firefox();
if (ipAddress != null && port != null) {
Proxy proxy = new Proxy();
proxy.setHttpProxy(ipAddress + ":" + port);
proxy.setFtpProxy(ipAddress + ":" + port);
proxy.setSslProxy(ipAddress + ":" + port);
dc.setCapability(CapabilityType.PROXY, proxy);
}
firefoxOptions.merge(dc);
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(firefoxOptions);
return driver;
}
Before running above code Task Manager showed Java Platform Binary consuming 212 MB of memory. After running above code (nothing else was running on my machine at the time) the memory usage starting creeping up to 492 MB then to 636 MB then to 1,946 MB and to 13,000 MB. It hit a high of over 19,000 MB. I'm not running anything other than the default code from Selenium V3.
Below are some screenshots I captured showing how the memory is increasing rapidly.
Note: It started at less than 1,000 MB, but I only started capturing at 12,000 MB but you can see how it zooms from 12,000 MB to over 17,000 MB in screenshots below. Nothing else is running on my PC.
This is true whether or not I pass actual ipAddress and port as argument or whether I pass null for both arguments. The only thing different I can think of is that I've manually set proxy under Options -> General -> Network Settings -> Settings -> Manual Proxy Configuration. I'm obviously running a specific Firefox Profile as well. But I have no idea why this should cause such long launch times and consume so much memory. We're dealing with almost 20 GB of memory!
What's causing such a big memory hog and long launch times?
Thanks

Answer 1

This happens than you reuse Firefox Profile with cached images (may be it is GecoDriver bug I don't know). To fix the problem:
Clean up cache in you Firefox Profile. You can simply delete everything in folder <your_firefox_profile>/cache2
Turn off disk caching in your Firefox browser running under Selenium. May be you can do it with FirefoxOptions but I prefer to set browser.cache.disk.enable to false in about:config