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/

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