Memory Leak in Edit Mode?

The last few months have been filled with freezing streams, crashing files, bizarre typing (liiiiKE THIS< fffffor INSTANCE) and general slowness of processes and the loading of pages, especially opening new pages in browsers.

I’ve noticed a spooky development, too: an astronomical jump in memory usage whenever I open a WordPress post in Edit Mode that has photos. Whether I use Chrome or Firefox, memory usage skyrockets from around 112,000 K to 600,000 K and keeps climbing as long as the post remains open in Edit. It takes several minutes for the post to open completely and I cannot type anything in it during that time nor use the scroll bar to navigate within the post. Once it’s satisfactorily open, it’s sluggish to respond to text edits and won’t even acknowledge the clicking of buttons like “Update.” I’ve been editing long posts, full of photos, in WordPress for years and never had this problem before.

If I close Edit Mode, the memory usage stops climbing but does not go down again. Only closing that entire window in my browser completely ends the glut of memory usage. However, ending all the problems entirely requires a warm boot. I’m up to six or seven warm boots a day. A brief search in these forums and online revealed that others have encountered memory leaks in WordPress, too, although their situations don’t seem to mirror mine.

Is there a fix for this I haven’t heard about? Do I need to update to a new version? I am not a programmer, so if you have any ideas, please give it to me short and sweet. ?? Thanks so much!

Anna

Note: I’m not sure which version of WordPress I am using, I just selected “3.3.1” in the drop down menu so that I could post this new topic. Please let me know how to determine which version I have should that become vital to this inquiry.