Discussion Firefox 65 consumes 12GB of memory. 40% CPU

[mxnerd]

I leave Firefox running overnight with less than 10 tabs , this morning found that it consumes 12GB memory. (Got 24GB for my G3258 machine)

Closes all tabs and leave only Anandtech forum tab and it still take 3.5GB! No add-ons!

Thought Chrome was memory hog, yet Firefox was even a bigger memory hog, and CPU hog!

WTH?

 

[balloonshark]

I'm still running 62.0.3 and I only see about 230MB memory with 6 tabs open after about 1 hour. No videos or music playing in any of the tabs. A lot of stuff is block though with noscript and ublock origin installed so I'm sure they help.

I can't really help much but have you tried refreshing or reinstalling firefox lately? What version are you running? are any of the tabs streaming, refreshing, etc?

 

[mxnerd]

Title said the version is newest 65. I usually use Chrome, with AdGuard. Hardly use Firefox. But Chrome always remember the site's last http port number.

If I change the port number of a site (like changing my router's default port 80 to something else) then it stuck with the new port #),
that's why I started to use Firefox for rescue.

 

[mxnerd]

I restart Firefox several times and it sometimes consumes more than 1GB even 2GB. Then I found it has a performance settings regarding hardware acceleration. It seems if I raise the number of Content Process limit, the less memory it uses! The complete opposite claimed by Firefox. It just seems Firefox is very inconsistent!

When it's set at default 4, the memory can shot up to 2GB. When I adjusted to 6, it now only consume 400MB with only one Anandtech tab!

Will watch carefully today to see exactly what's going on.

Will also test with AdGuard add-on later.

 

[balloonshark]

Mines set to the default 4. In task manager under Apps it's using 160MB and the 4 background processes are using about 430MB total with 6 tabs open.

Version 65 is new. When I kept things more up to date I always waited for the next update after a new release which always fixed problem with the release version.

Firefox recently added a task mananger that shows more info on your tabs. Perhaps that may help. https://www.ghacks.net/2019/01/09/firefox-65-task-manager-with-memory-readings/

Here are troubleshooting steps that might help. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-ram

 

[mxnerd]

Thanks, I was just about to ask whether Firefox has something like task manager in Chrome! Glad I can get it by typing

about:performance

at the address bar to get the same thing.

Firefox looks normal now, still under 1GB. Don't really know what happened last night, almost eats up my system's remaining memory.

 

[balloonshark]

Check out the other link about troubleshooting if you want. It could be an add-on causing the problem.

 

[mxnerd]

Thanks. But like I said, I didn't have any add-on installed on Firefox yesterday.

Will leave it on overnight and see if same problem occurs again.

 

[mxnerd]

Left Firefox running overnight on 2 machines and both were under 600MB.

Good boys.

 

[balloonshark]

Good to hear upping the process count helped

 

[Ketchup]

Intereseing. Have you found any more info on what causes this to occur? Trying to understand why this number would cause less memory consumption. Does the change you made cause more CPU usage? That's the only reason I can think of for the default value using so much RAM.

 

[mxnerd]

Maybe it's caused by Firefox updating in the background? No idea.

This morning found that I have two Youtube tabs open and both were idling,

one tab consumes 180MB, another just 78MB.