Firefox gets very choppy with many tabs open (even though I have plenty of RAM)

Special K

Diamond Member
Jun 18, 2000
7,098
0
76
I am using Firefox 28.0 in Windows Vista 64 bit and have noticed that when I have many tabs open (many meaning >=12 or so), scrolling on webpages with dynamically loading content, such as Amazon and Facebook, is extremely slow. Amazon seems to be the worst in this regard.

What seems strange to me is that I'm only using 6/18 GB of my RAM, so it doesn't appear to be a memory issue, yet the number of open tabs does seem to be a factor.

Does anyone else experience this?
 

G73S

Senior member
Mar 14, 2012
635
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0
I experience the same thing in both Firefox and Pale Moon :(, I have 32 GB RAM (Free RAM is 30 GB)
 

Morbus

Senior member
Apr 10, 2009
998
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0
Last week I opened about 150 tabs with heavy images on Firefox. It crashed.

I tried it again, it crashed again.

It handles tabs without images fine, but for some reason, tabs with images get a bit too much.

I had RAM to spare.
 

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
19,407
12,927
136
My browsing habits generally involve regular browser restarts and several tabs, but I do regularly get FF/PM to open 38 tabs in one go and a 16 tab job every day. After it has finished loading them, responsiveness is fine. It's a bit choppy while they're loading. The pages aren't unusually image heavy per se, just average web pages (the 16 tab one consists of news sites and webcomics, the 38 tab one includes every page that I look for computer components on).

Plenty of CPU/RAM spare (Ph2 960T, 4GB RAM).

I use ABP and FlashBlock.
 
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G73S

Senior member
Mar 14, 2012
635
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Last week I opened about 150 tabs with heavy images on Firefox. It crashed.

I tried it again, it crashed again.

It handles tabs without images fine, but for some reason, tabs with images get a bit too much.

I had RAM to spare.

yeah I noticed hat too on both Firefox 28 and Firefox 29 Beta 5

Pale Moon doesn't crash with too many tabs open, but it's just choppy/jerky as hell. As much as I hate Chrome, nothing beats its smoothness
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,570
10,200
126
I had a TDR with my GT 430 NV card in Win7 HP 64-bit, while browsing Newegg in Waterfox 28.0 with a bunch of tabs open.

Then I had a bluescreen.

Could the new version of Waterfox have caused this?
 

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
19,407
12,927
136
What code was the BSOD?

IMO it seems unlikely that FF alone would cause a BSOD - it runs entirely in userland. The most likely suspect would be the video hardware acceleration option, which would point at the graphics driver.
 

ninaholic37

Golden Member
Apr 13, 2012
1,883
31
91
@Special K: What is your CPU? I have no issues with Facebook on my Pentium M, but I don't keep >12 tabs open. Try turning off Smooth Scrolling and see if that helps. The laptop I had with Vista was quite buggy. Did Firefox work ok for you before version 28?
 

Chiefcrowe

Diamond Member
Sep 15, 2008
5,050
194
116
Does updating graphics drivers help at all?

I don't notice much choppiness at all and i'm on a slow PC a lot with 2 GB ram, and i have a lot of tabs open usually.
 

zir_blazer

Golden Member
Jun 6, 2013
1,206
502
136
On Firefox, if you have one very long page loading tons of images, or content that autorefreshes itself (Anyone remembers MtGox Live?), activity on one tab lags the entire Firefox. That's the reason why Chrome is tremendously more responsive with its one-thread-per-tab system, even if you're opening them for a Youtube overdose.
 

Special K

Diamond Member
Jun 18, 2000
7,098
0
76
@Special K: What is your CPU? I have no issues with Facebook on my Pentium M, but I don't keep >12 tabs open. Try turning off Smooth Scrolling and see if that helps. The laptop I had with Vista was quite buggy. Did Firefox work ok for you before version 28?

I'm using a core i7 @ 3 GHz and a GTX 260 factory overclocked. This hardware is admittedly several years old, but browsing the web shouldn't require brand new hardware, right?

I was using IE9 (max version supported by Vista) before Firefox and it had the same symptoms, but in that case it was consuming all of my RAM.

I had the same issues with prior versions of Firefox. I'm not sure which version I started with; I have been using Firefox since late last year.
 
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Engineer

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
39,230
701
126
Came here to post this. FF 28 comes to a crawl on an older laptop and pegs out at 50% CPU usage when loading pages with quite a few photo's / graphics.
 

Ketchup

Elite Member
Sep 1, 2002
14,558
248
106
I did a little test and have about 40 tabs (both with and without flash) open, FF 28.0 I am not experiencing any issue.

I am wondering if you folks are experiencing the 'issue' Mozilla introduced a few versions back, where only the active tab loads content. If you are quicky switching back and forth between tabs, or telling it to load your last session of 20+ tabs, I could see how this could be perceived as general slowness.
 
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G73S

Senior member
Mar 14, 2012
635
0
0
seems like my problem was that I updated to the latest nVIDIA Driver.

Here are the PassMark 2D Test results, I was wrong by thinking that the latest nVIDIA Drivers offered the best performance, maybe in games, but not in 2D at least, which is where I spend most my time, I rarely if ever play games

326.83 (official driver for my G750JX laptop from ASUS)

Graphics 2D - Simple Vectors: 32.6
Graphics 2D - Complex Vectors: 127.5
Graphics 2D - Fonts and Text: 251.3
Graphics 2D - Windows Interface: 142.7
Graphics 2D - Image Filters: 927.7
Graphics 2D - Image Rendering: 860.0
Graphics 2D - Direct 2D: 26.0
2D Graphics Mark: 829.4
PassMark Rating: 1977.3

===============================================================================
332.33 (nVIDIA Driver downloaded from ASUS stolen from the G750JM drivers download page)

Graphics 2D - Simple Vectors: 33.9
Graphics 2D - Complex Vectors: 124.6
Graphics 2D - Fonts and Text: 258.7
Graphics 2D - Windows Interface: 144.5
Graphics 2D - Image Filters: 929.8
Graphics 2D - Image Rendering: 859.2
Graphics 2D - Direct 2 D 25.8
2D Graphics Mark: 835.0
PassMark Rating: 1990.6
===============================================================================
332.60 (nVIDIA Driver downloaded from ASUS stolen from the G750JS drivers download page)

Graphics 2D - Simple Vectors: 29.7
Graphics 2D - Complex Vectors: 123.0
Graphics 2D - Fonts and Text: 253.1
Graphics 2D - Windows Interface: 144.2
Graphics 2D - Image Filters: 973.1
Graphics 2D - Image Rendering: 873.5
Graphics 2D - Direct 2 D 25.9
2D Graphics Mark: 818.1
PassMark Rating: 1950.5
================================================================================
337.50 (latest nVIDIA BETA Driver)

Graphics 2D - Simple Vectors: 33.9
Graphics 2D - Complex Vectors: 124.2
Graphics 2D - Fonts and Text: 253.9
Graphics 2D - Windows Interface: 141.0
Graphics 2D - Image Filters: 917.1
Graphics 2D - Image Rendering: 831.0
Graphics 2D - Direct 2 D 25.0
2D Graphics Mark: 821.3
PassMark Rating: 1957.9
================================================================================
 
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code65536

Golden Member
Mar 7, 2006
1,006
0
76
Keep in mind that Firefox is a 32-bit process, so it can use, at most, 2GB of RAM with a 32-bit Windows, and 4GB of RAM with a 64-bit Windows.

So how much memory is it actually using?

*If* it is a memory issue, you could get a 64-bit version of Firefox (either the Nightly or Pale Moon).
 

Special K

Diamond Member
Jun 18, 2000
7,098
0
76
I did a little test and have about 40 tabs (both with and without flash) open, FF 28.0 I am not experiencing any issue.

I am wondering if you folks are experiencing the 'issue' Mozilla introduced a few versions back, where only the active tab loads content. If you are quicky switching back and forth between tabs, or telling it to load your last session of 20+ tabs, I could see how this could be perceived as general slowness.

Can this "feature" be disabled - i.e. can I make it so all tabs load content?
 

Special K

Diamond Member
Jun 18, 2000
7,098
0
76
Keep in mind that Firefox is a 32-bit process, so it can use, at most, 2GB of RAM with a 32-bit Windows, and 4GB of RAM with a 64-bit Windows.

So how much memory is it actually using?

*If* it is a memory issue, you could get a 64-bit version of Firefox (either the Nightly or Pale Moon).

Mine is using less than 2 GB whenever I notice the issue. Right now it's at 1.3 GB and I notice the slowdown.
 

fire400

Diamond Member
Nov 21, 2005
5,204
21
81
on chrome, had close to 80-100 windows open on 64-bit OS with 8GB. gets choppy if flash ads are running in bg. very unstable nonetheless.

i've noticed firefox is much more stable with far, far fewer tabs.

u guys think firefox has limited programming?
 

Dude111

Golden Member
Jan 19, 2010
1,495
5
81
Morbus said:
Last week I opened about 150 tabs with heavy images on Firefox. It crashed.
Heh I have MyIE2 and the same thing happens to me sometimes with many open/large images!! (Bogs right down,cant do a thing!!)
 

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
19,407
12,927
136
I am wondering if you folks are experiencing the 'issue' Mozilla introduced a few versions back, where only the active tab loads content. If you are quicky switching back and forth between tabs, or telling it to load your last session of 20+ tabs, I could see how this could be perceived as general slowness.

AFAIK, it's only when loading a previous session that this occurs. When I load the tab jobs I mentioned, all the page content has already loaded by the time I get to the tab. However, if I start Firefox then get it to restore a previous session with lots of tabs, it loads each tab's content when the tab has the focus.
 

code65536

Golden Member
Mar 7, 2006
1,006
0
76
These are some of the culprits that I've personally seen in my usage:

* Flash. Especially noticeable if I'm using a low-end machine like my netbook on sites that have Flash-based ads (like Anandtech :p). I always have Process Explorer open, so it's trivial for me to select the Flash plugin-container process and kill that process tree, which instantly kills all Flash, and sometimes that does wonders.

* Background JavaScript. This is more of a problem with "Web 2.0" sites where pages and content are self-updating. All that background polling can add up and become costly (also, the constant creation and destruction of JS objects churns the heap and garbage collector). Depending on what I have open, disabling JavaScript on my netbook can bring my Firefox CPU usage from 50% down to 5% almost instantly (toggling JS through about:config takes immediate effect, though if you plan on toggling JS often, I'd recommend using NoScript instead). Modern sites use crazy amounts of JS (this becomes more apparent when you use NoScript regularly), and unlike mobile browsers, things keep running in the inactive tabs on desktop browsers, which can add up quickly.

* Increasing heap fragmentation and JavaScript garbage collection. Not that much to be done about this, though (except disabling JavaScript). Usually, after I start Firefox, things work fine for a while, and then it starts to get laggy, and I also notice that memory usage has usually bloated up to something like 6GB or more (I'm using a 64-bit build because I have literally thousands of tabs). But if I have NoScript running, this degradation happens much, much more slowly (might take weeks before it gets annoying). The nature of the lags feel very much like garbage collection to me, and the RAM bloat after running for a long time looks a lot like heap fragmentation (which, in fairness, is a problem faced by any browser and JS engine), and a highly-fragmented heap can cause garbage collectors to slow and lag. Well, that's my theory, anyway--I've never instrumented this to confirm my suspicions. Chrome and IE work around this problem by using multiple processes, which spreads out this "wear and tear" between processes, but in practice, there is so much overhead that it breaks down even worse with my insane-number-of-tabs browsing style.
 
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mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
19,407
12,927
136
Replying to code65536's post, yes, I've sometimes noticed that FF's CPU usage on my Ph2 960T is around 11% even though I'm not actively using it. Last time this happened I had FB open. I restart the browser when that happens. It also sometimes happens with Flash / plugin-container (I have no other plug-ins installed).

I can't say I've noticed a drop-off in responsiveness as well, but anyway.

I have Process Explorer open and minimised to the systray non-stop just to give me general feedback of what the system is up to.

Though I think if people are mentioning how much RAM FF is using, it helps to also mention how much RAM you have in your system as well. PM on my system is usually a fairly typical 400MB (with a few tabs open including FB currently). This would be problematic on a 1GB RAM system, but on my 4GB rig (of which 3GB is usually spare if nothing is running), this isn't a problem. The reason why I mention this is that Firefox (when behaving normally) uses up to a percentage of the available RAM. Other apps like Photoshop do this as well.
 
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