FireFox memory usage
Don Lewis
truckman at FreeBSD.org
Fri Sep 15 18:05:27 UTC 2017
On 15 Sep, Eugene Grosbein wrote:
> On 15.09.2017 18:35, Andrea Venturoli wrote:
>> Hello.
>>
>> I'm on 10.3/amd64 with firefox-esr 52.3.0.
>>
>> Since a few days my 4GiB desktop is crawling due to swap usage and
>> looking at top, I see FireFox using almost 7GiB of RAM (SIZE column),
>> 2.5 of which are "RES".
>>
>> I don't think this is normal, since I'm not doing anything fancy (i.e.
>> running webapps or opening tenth of windows/tabs).
>>
>> I've been using FF for several years and, while I recognize it's
>> constantly getting slower, more bloated and more resource hungry, I find
>> it hard to believe such a sudden rise in memory usage might be normal.
>>
>> One suspect I have is some kind of memory leak, since closing FF and
>> reopening the same sites I had opened before will drop the RAM usage to
>> under 1GiB.
>>
>> I'm lost at what to look at... I don't even know if it's an upstream or
>> FreeBSD problem.
>>
>> I start by asking if anyone else is seeing this and/or if anything in
>> the way it is ported or in its dependencies could be the cause of this.
>
> It leaks like female animal under Windows, too. This depends heavily on your
> set of addons, though. For example, NoScript addon may provoke Javascript code
> of sites to leak memory constantly retrying to get their garbage.
> In such case, close/reopen a tab may help for some period of time.
Javascript seems to be the culprit in my case. I do run NoScript, but
I'm pretty sure that I had memory consumption issues before I added the
NoScript addon. I keep a huge number of tabs open and I've seen Firefox
consume 40+ GB of memory (I've currently got a lot of RAM and swap
available on my desktop). Firefox memory consumption is what finally
motivated me to do a reinstall to switch from i386 to amd64 several
years ago, and since then was the motivation for a couple of RAM
upgrades.
Very recent versions of Firefox seem to have fixed this problem for me.
I think this was fixed in the version 54 to 55 upgrade. I probably have
300-400 tabs open right now and Firefox memory consumption seems to have
stabilized at a bit over 6 GB. It's been running for the last eight
days.
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