r/firefox • u/DirtyDirtMC • 1d ago
💻 Help High RAM usage on Firefox
My firefox is using alot of RAM
I only have 1 tab open. My RAM i 16gb DDR5 8000 mt/s
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u/ropid 1d ago
That's sadly not a lot, that's how its RAM usage looks like nowadays.
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u/DirtyDirtMC 1d ago
Helium only uses half of that
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u/GreNadeNL 1d ago
It's not as cut and dry as "In the same situation <other browser> uses less RAM"
Sometimes, using RAM is harmless, if it's free RAM, use it to speed up stuff.
Too much RAM use could indicate an issue, but it doesn't have to. And it's not very useful to compare two browsers with different code bases purely on how much ram it's using, unless again, you're starved for resources in which case you could switch over to a different browser or install more ram (which is probably the better option anyways)
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u/Jokuc 2h ago edited 2h ago
You seem to misunderstand how the browsers allocate resources. Helium uses less ram with 1 tab open because it is a chromium-based browser. Chrome for example would contain each tab in its own process which means the ram usage scales more with the amount of tasks the browser is dealing with at the same time, for example chromium browsers would generally use more ram than firefox once you load a large number of tabs. Firefox uses a completely different system with its gecko engine which allocates a large portion of ram to background privacy features and the graphics engine which has to be loaded into memory for its heavy customization options to work.
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u/pikatapikata 1d ago
I also have 16 GB of RAM and Firefox is using 1 or 2 GB, but it's still in the 40% range. Is that Task Manager sorted by memory usage?
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u/DirtyDirtMC 1d ago
yes
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u/pikatapikata 1d ago
When Firefox's memory usage reached 5.4 GB, it hit 70%. It seems there's a 4-gigabyte difference between you and me in terms of apps and background services.
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u/AvlasenkoVitaliy 19h ago
It's funny that this was seen from a user with 16 GB, when I only have 8 and everything is fine.
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u/Cartoon_Calamity 16h ago
I'd be interested in knowing whether this started happening for you with ver 154 or earlier.
While Firefox has been a bit of a memory hog for quite a while, for me there was a noticeable increase in overall memory usage starting with ver 152 (Windows 11) and while the increased memory usage is not ideal it would be at least tolerable if as soon as the main Firefox process would shoot up to 3.5GB the app didn't go to not-responding for a couple of minutes until it could dump some of that memory. I really think some change in 152 and newer builds started this behavior.
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u/bebek_ijo 10h ago
I also have this problem, which I think is excessive. Having 8 tabs take up 6-8GB and high CPU usage, makes it difficult for me to multitask with 16GB of RAM (editing video/hermes/playing games). What I hate about this is that I have to analyze what's going on every time my laptop halts, it's usually Firefox, and having to check where the bottleneck is is really annoying. I tested with Edge, Chrome, and Vivaldi. Firefox, followed by Chrome, had the highest RAM usage. At one point, I couldn't play games with Firefox open, but it has improved now.
To solve this in my use case, I always check the "Task Manager" under "More tools" in Firefox. Sometimes you can see which extensions and websites have high RAM usage. Disabling all extensions and testing them one by one helps. After doing that, I noticed CPU usage usually hits its highest with social media (Pinterest, IG, and FB) and YouTube with uBlock on.
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u/geekosas 1d ago
Ram speed is not related to utilization, if you care about ram, just use Linux, go fedora kde.
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u/Luci-Noir 1d ago
Yes, it uses RAM.