FireFox memory usage

[Kevin Oberman]

On Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 11:05 AM, Don Lewis <truckman at freebsd.org> wrote:

> 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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>

I have also seen significant improvements in  both memory use and
responsiveness in the last couple of releases. I do use noscript, but still
saw major delay for no obvious reason for JavaScript heavy sites like
Google applications and Facebook. These appeared rather around v48 and
disappeared around v54.
--
Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683