Hi Dumitru, Dumitru Moldovan <du...@gmx.com> wrote: > On Fri, Jul 05, 2019 at 01:25:10PM +0200, Richard Ulmer wrote: > >Hi all, > >after having Firefox running for some time (ca. 30min to 2h) my > >system seems to become slow. I get frequent freezes for several > >seconds, mpv instances start crashing and things like switching tabs > >in Firefox become a pain. > > > >I've got 4GB of RAM installed and when I look at htop after my system > >became slow, I can see that OpenBSD started swapping. When I close > >Firefox it takes several seconds and I can watch how my memory becomes > >free again in htop. My system is then again responsive. > > > >RAM prices seem to be low right now, but I don't want to spend money > >uneedingly and I didn't have this problem under Linux. Has anyone had > >similar experieces and noticed an improvement after a RAM upgrade? > > I have a desktop from 2009 with 8GB of RAM and faced a similar issue > with recent Firefox versions. For me, the problem was two-fold: > > 1. Recent Firefox versions start 8 rendering processes for my system > with 2 CPUs. I limited this in the preferences to just 2, ending up > with a total of 4 firefox processes at all times. You are refering to the "Content process limit" option in about:preferences, right? I haven't changed it and it was still at 8. I set it to 2 and compared the memory usage with the script I mentioned before. Memory usage went from 1474M to 1188M. That's a 20% improvement, not too bad, but will probably not stop my computer from swapping. Thanks for the tip, I'll keep this setting!
> 2. Web apps have grown in size disproportionally lately. You > mentioned Reddit, their modern web interface is such a RAM-hungry > monster. Consider using old.reddit.com instead or, even better, an > app leveraging their API. In the same vein, replace Gmail with a > light IMAP client, use git CLI tools instead of GitHub's web > interface, etc. I already try to avoid slow websites by using dedicated applications where possible (rtv for most of reddit, mblaze for mail, mpv for YouTube videos, partly ytools for browsing YouTube). Sill, I often find myself opening a bunch of StackOverflow, Reddit, Amazon, GitHub, ... pages in parallel, when I'm researching something. > Also, beware that Firefox leaks memory, especially with intensive web > apps. I usually restart it once a day or so lately. Another > workaround for unavoidable monster web apps is to use a dedicated > Chromium or Iridium instance per web app, eg. for Deezer's web player: > "iridium --app=https://deezer.com";. I heard multiple times now, that Firefox leaks memory. Maybe I'll give a new browser a shot. Iridium looked interesting, but upon research I found a lot of people concerned about whether this project has the resources to keep up with Chromiums security standards. The last commit for Iridium was 3 Months ago [1], so I'm not to sure if I want to use it.. Greetings and thanks for your input, Richard [1] https://git.iridiumbrowser.de/cgit.cgi/iridium-browser/
