Thanks for the report Daniel. Unfortunately browsers in general are becoming ever more memory-hungry, this is a general trend that doesn't play well with legacy systems with a modest amount of RAM (although the 12GBÂ that you mention should be plenty).
There is no silver bullet, but here are a few suggestions that could help. The "about:memory" page in firefox has a "Minimize memory usage" button that could help in some situations. If you tend to have a large number of tabs open, there are extensions that can suspend the ones in the background to reclaim used memory. Lastly, the nohang package suggested by Oibaf may be a good idea. It will kill renderer processes early, before your system starts swapping. If you are seeing actual memory leaks in firefox, I encourage you to report them upstream at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi#h=dupes%7CFirefox. I'm closing this bug as it's not really actionable, and unlikely Ubuntu-specific. Feel free to re-open with additional data if you think there are Ubuntu-specific problems that should be addressed. ** Changed in: firefox (Ubuntu) Status: Confirmed => Invalid -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to firefox in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1899309 Title: firefox leaks memory and crashes computer (lack of swap) Status in firefox package in Ubuntu: Invalid Bug description: I use lot's of tabs in firefox, and I also stream videos. Firefox uses lot's of memory in the first place, and it also seems to leak memory as well. The default install gave me very little swap. When my system runs out of memory, it swaps almost endlessly. This last time, it was more than 20 minutes of swapping, so I got frustrated, reboot, and now I'm filing a bug. I see this as affecting several aspects of my system: 1) the installer only gave me a 1g swap file to pair with my 12g of memory, and it gave me no option to set it myself. At some point, that changed to 2g and I don't know how. I installed on 18.04, fresh install over an old /home directory. A little background: I normally manually set my partitions (msdos), and give myself a swap partition that is at least the same size as my ram, and maybe up to double it. I upgraded to a new ssd drive, and tried to go with the new partitioning system, gpt. I realized I didn't know how to setup gpt, so I went with a default install, and copied over my /home from a backup. Anyway, not super important. 2)Firefox uses up tons of memory, and leaks it. Firefox also keeps asking for memory from my system, even though there is none left 3) My system keeps trying to give firefox more memory, even though there is none left. And it swap kills my system. Shouldn't the system just give firefox an oom error? 4) When I have let this whole swap death thing just go on, it eventually stops by killing some part of firefox and getting some more memory back. Usually it kills the extensions part of firefox. But why does it take so long? 5) There is no warning that my system is running out of memory. I feel like each of the above is a different bug, at a certain level, and they are all coming together and crashing my system. I filed this bug against firefox because, on irc, it was suggested as a place to start. ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04 Package: firefox 81.0+build2-0ubuntu0.20.04.1 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-48.52-generic 5.4.60 Uname: Linux 5.4.0-48-generic x86_64 AddonCompatCheckDisabled: False ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.9 Architecture: amd64 AudioDevicesInUse: USER PID ACCESS COMMAND /dev/snd/controlC0: dan 977 F.... pulseaudio /dev/snd/controlC1: dan 977 F.... pulseaudio BuildID: 20200917005511 CasperMD5CheckResult: skip Channel: Unavailable CurrentDesktop: XFCE Date: Sat Oct 10 21:42:58 2020 Extensions: extensions.sqlite corrupt or missing ForcedLayersAccel: False IfupdownConfig: # interfaces(5) file used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8) auto lo iface lo inet loopback IncompatibleExtensions: Unavailable (corrupt or non-existant compatibility.ini or extensions.sqlite) InstallationDate: Installed on 2020-04-01 (192 days ago) InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20180426) IpRoute: default via 192.168.1.1 dev wlp3s0 proto dhcp metric 600 169.254.0.0/16 dev wlp3s0 scope link metric 1000 192.168.1.0/24 dev wlp3s0 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.1.168 metric 600 Locales: extensions.sqlite corrupt or missing MostRecentCrashID: bp-48402263-1b90-42d3-86b7-c699e0181219 PrefErrors: Unexpected character ',' before close parenthesis @ /usr/lib/firefox/omni.ja:greprefs.js:733 PrefSources: prefs.js Profiles: Profile0 (Default) - LastVersion=81.0/20200917005511 (In use) RunningIncompatibleAddons: False SourcePackage: firefox SubmittedCrashIDs: bp-48402263-1b90-42d3-86b7-c699e0181219 bp-b69a351e-b146-48a6-b796-51a930180711 bp-02f439df-b929-4277-8faa-692570180518 Themes: extensions.sqlite corrupt or missing UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2020-09-29 (11 days ago) dmi.bios.date: 09/03/2013 dmi.bios.vendor: Dell Inc. dmi.bios.version: A05 dmi.board.name: 0CYT5F dmi.board.vendor: Dell Inc. dmi.board.version: A00 dmi.chassis.type: 9 dmi.chassis.vendor: Dell Inc. dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnDellInc.:bvrA05:bd09/03/2013:svnDellInc.:pnLatitudeE6540:pvr01:rvnDellInc.:rn0CYT5F:rvrA00:cvnDellInc.:ct9:cvr: dmi.product.name: Latitude E6540 dmi.product.sku: Latitude E6540 dmi.product.version: 01 dmi.sys.vendor: Dell Inc. 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