firefox

[Kevin Oberman]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 11:20 PM Jack L. <xxjack12xx at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 10:51 AM Kevin Oberman <rkoberman at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 1:29 AM Jack L. <xxjack12xx at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 1:32 PM Miroslav Lachman <000.fbsd at quip.cz>
> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > @lbutlr wrote on 2019/08/12 07:08:
> >> > > On 11 Aug 2019, at 20:29, bruce <bruce at hawaii-pacific.com> wrote:
> >> > >> I have tried firefox.  It crashes regularly
> >> > >
> >> > > That doesn’t sound right. If Firefox is crashing a lot there is
> something not quite right with your system or install.
> >> >
> >> > I am using Seamonkey on everyday basis. Sometimes my computer is
> running
> >> > 20+ days without reboot and Seamonkey running all the time with 5
> >> > windows and total count of 200+ openned tabs. No crashes at all.
> >> > Firefox crashes instantly after start (even if I delete its profile)
> >> > Palemoon, Qupzilla, Iridium crashes few times a day.
> >> > LibreOffice, Gimp and other apps are running fine. Only browsers are
> so
> >> > unstable these days. And as you can read I am not alone with this kind
> >> > of experience so I don't think it's just my computer problem.
> >> >
> >> > Miroslav Lachman
> >>
> >> yup, they don't make browsers like they used to
> >
> >
> > I'll probably regret opening this potential can of worms, but I find
> these reports of instability in Firefox surprising. I have used Firfox as
> my web browser on FreeBSD for many year, going back to at least Firefox v3
> and probably v2. I can't say I've never had it crash, but in the past year
> I can't recall a single crash on FreeBSD. It has been rock solid. So why is
> it failing or some people? (I'll note in passing that Firefox has been
> somewhat less stable on Windows 7 where it seems to crash every couple of
> weeks.
> >
> > Possibilities include hardware, especially graphics, web sites visited,
> and Firefox configuration. Lots of tabs may be an issue as I try to keep my
> open tabs under 20.
> >  I can't imagine trying to deal with 200+, but it must eat a lot of
> resources. That may be tied to the failures reported.
>
> My experience with firefox is it gets slower and slower and slower
> until it's practically unusable until it's restarted (even having only
> the gmail tab open for days)
>

Try looking at the memory pressure on your system. Firefox, especially when
running heavy-duty pages like gmail. I noticed that rss (res on top) would
grow until swapping started. It would continue until my swap partition was
full followed by the expected... the system grinding to a halt. I could
usually catch it before swap was full and restarting firefox would fix it
for a while. If you want to monitor memory use, I suggest
sysutils/gkrellm2. To looks at firefox use, "ps -uc | grep firefox"
provides the rss for all firefox processes. rss is hte 6th column. You
could write a quick script to sum the numbers, but I have just added them
up manually.

I increased RAM from 4G to 8, the max for the hardware, and that improved
things a lot. (If you add memory, don't forget to enlarge swap.) Firefox
still is huge, but the system now handles it much better. I checked the
INITIAL memory use by Firefox recently and it was nearly 3.7G. And it grows
from there.

I saw similar issues with chrome, but I no longer use it.
--
Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683