5 ms·

I'm in the same boat. Who are these people who are running out of memory? What on earth are you doing and how old is your machine?

by skrowl 4y ago

julienreszka 4y ago
they probably have thousands of tabs open
- wkdneidbwf 4y ago
  and extensions to hell and back
pdntspa 4y ago
Firefox has been solid for me since the dawn of time, and I have or currently run it on Windows, Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD. For a while it used to be kind of slow on Mac and Linux, but I think that was slow graphics calls, which points to a possible issue with the graphics driver I was using. But the last time I checked (many months ago), it was much better.
- com2kid 4y ago
  I've seen plenty of webgl content that will hard crash FF 100% of the time. Perhaps not FFs fault, could be an underlying driver issue, but ideally web content is sandboxed enough that it can't bring down everything. I once saw a unity web game with a bug that crashed all major browsers across multiple OSes. Go go web tech!
  - LoganDark 4y ago
    Even the crashes are cross-platform!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BlueTemplar 4y ago
Unlike Opera 12 that could handle up to a thousand of tabs, Firefox (until 105 ??) already starts slowing down around 100. I was pretty much forced to install the Auto Tab Discard extension, which I'm guessing was built-in in Opera 12 ??
- zargon 4y ago
  I use Firefox with 1200+ tabs for the last, I don't know, 60 or 80 versions.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    The tabs have all been visited since you last restarted firefox?
    - zargon 4y ago
      It of course depends. I typically open dozens to several hundred new tabs per session.
Etherlord87 4y ago
You don't need a lot to eventually get a crash on Firefox. All you really need is to hibernate/sleep instead of restarting, and so never restart your Firefox, and have some Twitch stream opened - the memory leaks will eventually use up all your memory, in my experience at least.
com2kid 4y ago
For the longest time, maybe it still happens, leaving an Ars Technica story open in a Firefox tab would gradually leak memory until RAM was exhausted. So, you know, anyone who opens a story on Ars Technica to read later and then forgets about the tab. I've seen YT do similar things in the past as well.
gsvelto 4y ago
Here's the thing: they're not! The reason those users where crashing was because something, somewhere (possibly in the graphics stack) was reserving ton of space without using it. We had crashes on file with 20+ GiB of free physical memory which was the reason why I started looking into why a machine with so much free memory could suffer a crash. I hope I described how this whole things work because Windows memory management is not well known and some things about it are counter-intuitive; especially if you're coming from Linux.
- LoganDark 4y ago
  I can confirm this is the case. Firefox reserves tens of gigabytes and then only actually uses a few. But since those tens of unused gigabytes are still committed, nothing else on the system can use it, and Firefox (+ tons of other apps) will OOM when the total committed memory (of all applications) reaches the total amount of RAM installed. I have 17 crashes on file (in about:crashes) that are OOMs caused by Firefox committing too much memory and not using it. My solution is to restart the browser when committed memory reaches 38GB or so, but that clears all private windows which annoys me. I shouldn't have to restart the browser so often.
  - gsvelto 4y ago
    Could you open a bug on our tracker, and point to those crash reports? I'm very interested in analyzing real-world scenarios where this happens to figure out where those committed areas are coming from. Our best guess is that they come from the graphics stack because we account all the memory we commit in Firefox and there's nothing missing, so wherever this is coming from it's outside of our direct control.
    - LoganDark 4y ago
      I actually did open up about:memory a few hours ago and now, and it looks like some growth is coming from "heap-unclassified" in the main process. As for opening a bug on your tracker, meh but I can give you a list of report IDs: bp-e6392a4b-44e8-4013-a80e-1027b0221109 bp-dae0a056-3c6a-43ea-ad3f-5fe1a0221006 bp-0be1e0f7-0eca-4744-a05c-ce2030220927 bp-65c63eea-fb45-419d-a58a-82ef20220915 bp-061b6131-5ae3-4de1-a7ba-0c4950220830 bp-32f879a0-f76f-4a5b-bef9-f013f0220820
Karunamon 4y ago
I recall a particularly strange Firefox bug on Windows where the browser would die with an out of memory error even though there were upwards of 16 GB free to use. As it turns out something was consuming large amounts of swap on the system, and this was where the out of memory condition was happening.
anonymousab 4y ago
For me, Firefox slows down dramatically as it uses more memory (e.g. more tabs and windows opened), and reaches a less-than-usable state well before it has exhausted the available memory. Tab discarding - automatic or by literally closing the tabs - does seem to recover the memory used, but does not recover much of the performance (if any). My AMD 5800 and tens of gigs of memory runs into the same crushing performance blockers as my old 8GB FX-8300 machine, with virtually the same "workload" and usage profile. Kinda the opposite of what I'd want; I usually have over 16GB more that Firefox could use if it needed, and that's once it has reached critical mass with maybe hundreds of tabs. Its memory measurements usually look sane, so I feel like there's some data structure or algorithm that is doing something insane in the background - which is already confirmed to be the case with the History menu, particularly if you select and delete thousands of items at a time.

I'm in the same boat. Who are these people who are running out of memory? What on earth are you doing and how old is your machine?

by skrowl 4y ago

I'm in the same boat. Who are these people who are running out of memory? What on earth are you doing and how old is your machine?

julienreszka 4y ago

they probably have thousands of tabs open

wkdneidbwf 4y ago
and extensions to hell and back

pdntspa 4y ago

Firefox has been solid for me since the dawn of time, and I have or currently run it on Windows, Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD. For a while it used to be kind of slow on Mac and Linux, but I think that was slow graphics calls, which points to a possible issue with the graphics driver I was using. But the last time I checked (many months ago), it was much better.

com2kid 4y ago
I've seen plenty of webgl content that will hard crash FF 100% of the time. Perhaps not FFs fault, could be an underlying driver issue, but ideally web content is sandboxed enough that it can't bring down everything. I once saw a unity web game with a bug that crashed all major browsers across multiple OSes. Go go web tech!
- LoganDark 4y ago
  Even the crashes are cross-platform!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BlueTemplar 4y ago

Unlike Opera 12 that could handle up to a thousand of tabs, Firefox (until 105 ??) already starts slowing down around 100. I was pretty much forced to install the Auto Tab Discard extension, which I'm guessing was built-in in Opera 12 ??

zargon 4y ago
I use Firefox with 1200+ tabs for the last, I don't know, 60 or 80 versions.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  The tabs have all been visited since you last restarted firefox?
  - zargon 4y ago
    It of course depends. I typically open dozens to several hundred new tabs per session.

Etherlord87 4y ago

You don't need a lot to eventually get a crash on Firefox. All you really need is to hibernate/sleep instead of restarting, and so never restart your Firefox, and have some Twitch stream opened - the memory leaks will eventually use up all your memory, in my experience at least.

com2kid 4y ago

For the longest time, maybe it still happens, leaving an Ars Technica story open in a Firefox tab would gradually leak memory until RAM was exhausted. So, you know, anyone who opens a story on Ars Technica to read later and then forgets about the tab. I've seen YT do similar things in the past as well.

gsvelto 4y ago

Here's the thing: they're not! The reason those users where crashing was because something, somewhere (possibly in the graphics stack) was reserving ton of space without using it. We had crashes on file with 20+ GiB of free physical memory which was the reason why I started looking into why a machine with so much free memory could suffer a crash. I hope I described how this whole things work because Windows memory management is not well known and some things about it are counter-intuitive; especially if you're coming from Linux.

LoganDark 4y ago
I can confirm this is the case. Firefox reserves tens of gigabytes and then only actually uses a few. But since those tens of unused gigabytes are still committed, nothing else on the system can use it, and Firefox (+ tons of other apps) will OOM when the total committed memory (of all applications) reaches the total amount of RAM installed. I have 17 crashes on file (in about:crashes) that are OOMs caused by Firefox committing too much memory and not using it. My solution is to restart the browser when committed memory reaches 38GB or so, but that clears all private windows which annoys me. I shouldn't have to restart the browser so often.
- gsvelto 4y ago
  Could you open a bug on our tracker, and point to those crash reports? I'm very interested in analyzing real-world scenarios where this happens to figure out where those committed areas are coming from. Our best guess is that they come from the graphics stack because we account all the memory we commit in Firefox and there's nothing missing, so wherever this is coming from it's outside of our direct control.
  - LoganDark 4y ago
    I actually did open up about:memory a few hours ago and now, and it looks like some growth is coming from "heap-unclassified" in the main process. As for opening a bug on your tracker, meh but I can give you a list of report IDs: bp-e6392a4b-44e8-4013-a80e-1027b0221109 bp-dae0a056-3c6a-43ea-ad3f-5fe1a0221006 bp-0be1e0f7-0eca-4744-a05c-ce2030220927 bp-65c63eea-fb45-419d-a58a-82ef20220915 bp-061b6131-5ae3-4de1-a7ba-0c4950220830 bp-32f879a0-f76f-4a5b-bef9-f013f0220820

Karunamon 4y ago

I recall a particularly strange Firefox bug on Windows where the browser would die with an out of memory error even though there were upwards of 16 GB free to use. As it turns out something was consuming large amounts of swap on the system, and this was where the out of memory condition was happening.

anonymousab 4y ago

For me, Firefox slows down dramatically as it uses more memory (e.g. more tabs and windows opened), and reaches a less-than-usable state well before it has exhausted the available memory. Tab discarding - automatic or by literally closing the tabs - does seem to recover the memory used, but does not recover much of the performance (if any). My AMD 5800 and tens of gigs of memory runs into the same crushing performance blockers as my old 8GB FX-8300 machine, with virtually the same "workload" and usage profile. Kinda the opposite of what I'd want; I usually have over 16GB more that Firefox could use if it needed, and that's once it has reached critical mass with maybe hundreds of tabs. Its memory measurements usually look sane, so I feel like there's some data structure or algorithm that is doing something insane in the background - which is already confirmed to be the case with the History menu, particularly if you select and delete thousands of items at a time.