Firefox “Performance” Tab Will Curb Its RAM Hunger

Megalith

Megalith

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I always assumed that Firefox had some kind of underlying memory problem because of how sluggish it would get as it consumed more and more RAM, but now I’m not so sure what the actual issue is, since Chrome can hog even more memory but remain relatively speedy. Therefore, I’m skeptical whether these new “performance” options will actually do anything, although the support for more processes sounds somewhat promising.

Right now, Firefox only supports two processes (for the core and content), but starting with version 55, it will support three or more, putting it on par with Chrome, Safari and others. With the performance settings, the developers will give you more granular control of those, so you can trade off speed for memory usage. "More content processes will make Firefox more responsive when using multiple tabs, but will also consume more memory," according to the proposed UX.
 
I've recently switched over to chrome on all my machines from firefox due to excessive startup lag and then loading web pages (esp multiples) taking forever. This affected my aging laptop (circa 09), but Chrome is definitely much more speedy.
 
I wish they made a version that throws all caution in the wind and eats gobs of RAM but is much faster. Having 32GB RAM on a desktop machine is no longer fiction, and I wouldn't care if FF ate up 10GB of that but would cruise along faster.
 
I wish the android version of Firefox would receive some love, it's a slug.
Cute fox is Om Nom Nomen the heck out of that memory.
 
i use all chrome, firefox and edge at work. Firefox by far is the worst. When it starts lagging, its an early warning sign... i need to reboot my machine, or it will crash, black screen and lock up with a constant noise through my speakers. Only way to get out is to power off. So periodically i close firefox and reopen and it seems to help. Never have problems with edge or chrome like that.
 
in my mind using as much RAM as possible is a good thing

what would you use instead of RAM if you have to?
the swap file, best in a slow laptop HDD ?


now wasting RAM and getting sluggish is not related to how much RAM is being used but rather a sign for more optimization efforts
 
Firefox also has a memory leak, even if I don't open up any new pages, over time it just consumes more ram. After 24 hours of normal web browsing, FF is using around 2.5GB.
The latest version doesn't get sluggish anymore with high memory usage as much as it used to.
 
Nothing can touch old Opera when it comes to performance with many tabs open over a long period of time.

Firefox has a certain point when it just craps out, no matter how much RAM or CPU you throw at it.
 
I've paid big bucks to have 64 GB of ram in my system and I want it to sit at 1.5GB used by Windows and that's it!

This was a joke, but people act this way.
 
Firefox multiprocess is already a thing: it's called electrolysis, or e10s. It's been live since Firefox 48 back in June of last year.

You can check if it's enabled in about:support under multiprocess windows. If it's disabled then you can enable it by setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true. If after changing the value to true it's still showing as disabled, make a new boolean value called browser.tabs.remote.force-enable and set it to true. From there you can control how many containers the firefox process will spawn via the dom.ipc.processCount variable.

If you're running plugins, you'll want to check if they're e10s compatible at: https://arewee10syet.com/
At this point most of them are and many that aren't have e10s compatible versions on their development channels.

I've been a firefox user since firebird 0.6 (currently using waterfox) so I absolutely rely on Firefox's address bar behavior in terms of URL completion, suggestions pulled from browsing history, and searchable page titles. I've also come to lean pretty heavily on All Tabs Helper, FlashStopper, and Tab Mix Plus in my day-to-day browsing workflow. But, in recent times firefox (prior to enabling e10s) has been absolutely awful--requiring me to restart my browsing sessions on sometimes an hourly basis since once any one tab would start leaking it'd tank the entire browsing session.

But, e10s splits the UI process off from the content containers which prevents rogue tabs from affecting the rest of the browser. The default setting is one container, though you can increase it to more. If you set the containers to more than 1, it opens a new process for each tab until you hit the number you set it to--at which point new tabs are split across open containers. It isn't as good as Chrome's per-tab containers in terms of being able to isolate and kill single tabs that are pulling CPU cycles, so I still use Chrome on my laptop. But in terms of performance and overall responsiveness it's basically on par with Chrome now.

Since each tab isn't truly isolated to processes like Chrome, you probably want to keep the dom.ipc.processCount variable under 10. I had initially set mine to 100 and was getting all kinds of weird DX9 allocator fail errors and running out of virtual memory even though I had plenty of RAM free. Currently running it at 8 processes and that seems to be working pretty well.

Anyway, most of you probably don't really care too much about browsers but just thought I'd share in case any firefox users out there were unaware of e10s. For me it was practically life changing, after years of waiting finally I have the functionality of firefox + the performance of chrome.
 
Mine says 1/1 enabled by user. I have an i7, can you please tell me how to make that number 8 like you suggest?
Thanks
 
jimlite said:
Mine says 1/1 enabled by user. I have an i7, can you please tell me how to make that number 8 like you suggest?
Thanks
Click to expand...

Hi, sorry, forgot to mention that you can find the various settings in about:config. The setting you're looking for is dom.ipc.processCount.

The 1/1 number iirc refers to the number of actual firefox windows you have open, not the number of processes, you'll see the extra firefox processes in your task manager as you load more tabs. Also keep in mind that currently, installing any plugins or enabling any accessibility options tends to disable e10s--at which point you'll need to manually force enable it (by creating a boolean called browser.tabs.remote.force-enable and setting it to true).

For most sane people 2-4 processes is probably plenty, but I upped mine since I routinely have 100-150 tabs open at any given time.
 
Thanks a lot.I will try it out with 8 because I am like you and have 50 tabs open in my laptop and 150 on my destop :)
And I also have to restart it multiple times/day. I also notice that sometimes I get a plug ins container or something like that in task manager using a ton of memory for firefox. Usually if I kill it it just comes back. I think my culprit is probably facebook or twitter tab or something with java or ads running, I dunno, but hope your fix of 8 works or their new version really solves it. My home rig I just built a Ryzen 8 core system, do you think I should set that one at 16 (one for each thread) with 150 open tabs and 16gb ram?
 
jimlite said:
Thanks a lot.I will try it out with 8 because I am like you and have 50 tabs open in my laptop and 150 on my destop :)
And I also have to restart it multiple times/day. I also notice that sometimes I get a plug ins container or something like that in task manager using a ton of memory for firefox. Usually if I kill it it just comes back. I think my culprit is probably facebook or twitter tab or something with java or ads running, I dunno, but hope your fix of 8 works or their new version really solves it. My home rig I just built a Ryzen 8 core system, do you think I should set that one at 16 (one for each thread) with 150 open tabs and 16gb ram?
Click to expand...

I built a Ryzen 8 core system as well and also thought about raising it to 16.. But since 8 seemed to run fine for me I kept it there. The problem is that each of those processes seemed to utilize a lot of virtual memory. I have 32GB of RAM and I was having windows crash due to running out of virtual memory--despite having 8-10GB of physical ram available. I don't really want to have a >10gb pagefile so I just backed the process count down to 8. With 16GB of ram I probably wouldn't go higher than 8 since each process has its own memory overhead and the more you have the more ram you use. I routinely hit around 20GB of memory usage but I also have a VM (which iirc I gave 4gb of ram to) and other things running.
 
Jim Kim said:
I wish the android version of Firefox would receive some love, it's a slug.
Click to expand...

The only good feature that browser has is the ability to listen to youtube audio with screen closed. Otherwise it's awful.
 
i wouldn't mind if i could actually feel the benefits. But FF ram usage keeps growing and pages aren't loading any faster.

not sure if it has to do with the few addons i have.
 
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