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Is the OOM problem still there even after Quantum release? This was the main turn off factor for me with FF long ago, and when the OOM fails to even trigger, th

Is the OOM problem still there even after Quantum release? This was the main turn off factor for me with FF long ago, and when the OOM fails to even trigger, the famous swap thrashing occurs. I tried again with Quantum, but then there were still stability problems causing the whole browser to lock up (just like Edge. But same problem existed in FF since long ago too), so I've never tried it anymore since then. Twice bitten, thrice shy.

igetspam 7y ago
Yes. My laptop is a Xeon with 32GB RAM and I can't keep FF alive for more than 4-6 hours. I let upstream (ubuntu) keep packages updated so I'm current.
- Yetanfou 7y ago
  That is... puzzling. I use Firefox on a 2GB Thinkpad T42p, regularly have 100+ tabs 'open' (as in 'opened in the background' which means it'll start rendering when I actually open the tab) over 2 or 3 active windows and I have never seen it being killed by the OOM killer. It can crawl due to paging but it does not get killed. To me this sounds like you should either add a bit of swap space or tune the OOM killer to be less trigger-happy.
  - nvrspyx 7y ago
    If they’re having OOM problems, especially with 32GB of RAM, I’d expect it to start thrashing the swap as it does mine on my Ubuntu box. As much as I like FF, it is not consistent across hardware/OS setups and I imagine it makes it rather difficult for Mozilla to debug as this has been an ongoing problem for years at this point.
    - Yetanfou 7y ago
      More likely there is no swap space defined so that any memory error will trigger the OOM killer.
- seba_dos1 7y ago
  Something's terribly wrong there. I'm using Firefox on a laptop with 8GB RAM and hundreds of open tabs. Chromium is unusable with just dozens of tabs due to maxing the available RAM; Firefox just slows down a lot after reaching something around a thousand (and it depends on the version - it's periodically getting better or worse at handling such amount of tabs), but no RAM issues whatsoever.

igetspam 7y ago

Yes. My laptop is a Xeon with 32GB RAM and I can't keep FF alive for more than 4-6 hours. I let upstream (ubuntu) keep packages updated so I'm current.

Yetanfou 7y ago
That is... puzzling. I use Firefox on a 2GB Thinkpad T42p, regularly have 100+ tabs 'open' (as in 'opened in the background' which means it'll start rendering when I actually open the tab) over 2 or 3 active windows and I have never seen it being killed by the OOM killer. It can crawl due to paging but it does not get killed. To me this sounds like you should either add a bit of swap space or tune the OOM killer to be less trigger-happy.
- nvrspyx 7y ago
  If they’re having OOM problems, especially with 32GB of RAM, I’d expect it to start thrashing the swap as it does mine on my Ubuntu box. As much as I like FF, it is not consistent across hardware/OS setups and I imagine it makes it rather difficult for Mozilla to debug as this has been an ongoing problem for years at this point.
  - Yetanfou 7y ago
    More likely there is no swap space defined so that any memory error will trigger the OOM killer.
seba_dos1 7y ago
Something's terribly wrong there. I'm using Firefox on a laptop with 8GB RAM and hundreds of open tabs. Chromium is unusable with just dozens of tabs due to maxing the available RAM; Firefox just slows down a lot after reaching something around a thousand (and it depends on the version - it's periodically getting better or worse at handling such amount of tabs), but no RAM issues whatsoever.