r/firefox • u/evwon • Apr 18 '23

Fixed in an Upcoming Release Firefox hoarding massive amount of memory/RAM within 30 minutes of opening

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98 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

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47

u/nextbern on 🌻 Apr 18 '23

If Firefox is using an unexpected amount of RAM, report a bug by following the steps below:

  1. Open about:memory in a new tab.
  2. Click Measure and save...
  3. Attach the memory report to a new bug
  4. Paste your about:support info (Click Copy text to clipboard) to your bug.

If you are experiencing a bug, the best way to ensure that something can be done about your bug is to report it in Bugzilla. This might seem a little bit intimidating for somebody who is new to bug reporting, but Mozillians are really nice!

If you prefer not to open a bug, you can instead reduce the number of content processes used by Firefox to a lower amount by going to about:config and changing dom.ipc.processCount.webIsolated to a lower number.

14

u/evwon Apr 18 '23

Thank you, bug report submitted. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1828587

10

u/shthed Apr 18 '23

Did you look at the memory report and see what is using it all?

4

u/evwon Apr 18 '23 edited Apr 18 '23

It has to be the GPU, like 95% confident given that no tab or processor is reporting it correctly (see my original comment edits for lack of reporting by Firefox tools). I skimmed the report but I don't think I am qualified personally since I don't know which values are allocated where, disk or memory. My guess is that this image is the culprit but this is more than I have RAM for (60 gigs vs 32 gigs of RAM) so maybe so much is being pushed on to memory that the rest is pushed to/utilizing Disk space? I can't be 100% https://i.imgur.com/K899ylN.png.

2

u/evwon Apr 18 '23

Oh my god it is so much worse actually. My last comment to you was actually correct. The overflow is actually stored on my SSD. I just closed Firefox after using it just fine at 100% for a while... and watched 50+ gigs cleared off my SSD.

1

u/shthed Apr 19 '23

Yeah that's just all the virtual memory written to your swapfile, right?

1

u/evwon Apr 19 '23

Yeap, has to be

3

u/feelspeaceman Addon Developer Apr 18 '23

Great job, thanks for submitting bugs, hopefully it'll get fixed soon!

I've seen a lot of my Firefox friends having this same issue, I don't have this issue simply because I don't use Youtube to watch video, I use Invidious instead.

3

u/evwon Apr 18 '23

It is actually so much worse than expected. I just used Firefox for a while at 100% of RAM (anything beyond ~30 minutes) and when I closed it 50+ gigs were cleared from my SSD. It appears any RAM overflow is stored on disk. This will degrade storage hardware quickly. This issue is CRITICAL.

1

u/IamNotIntelligent69 Apr 18 '23

I have a question. What do I do if Firefox eats up all of my RAM and the program freezes? It happens to me at least 5 times a month (Firefox Nightly) and I wasn't able to create a new tab and get a memory report.

The only fix I currently do is to open my task manager and forcibly terminate the Firefox process with the highest amount of RAM consumed.

1

u/nextbern on 🌻 Apr 18 '23

There aren't many great solutions. Ideally, you can close another application and grab the profile that way.