Firefox eating all RAM on Ubuntu24.04

[Sorin Srbu]

On tis, 2024-08-13 at 14:31 +0200, Carsten Agger wrote:
> Recently I've noticed, that certain rather JavaScript-heavy web pages - 
> especially RocketChat, Gitlab and Whereby.com video chat - seem to make 
> Firefox use gargantuan amounts of RAM, ending up exhausting the swap 
> space (I have 16GB of RAM and 1GB of swap space - too little swap, but 
> with 16G's of RAM that shouldn't be a problem).
> 
> I'm using Firefox 129 (Canonical snap edition) on Ubuntu 24.04. I'm not 
> seeing the same problem when viewing the same web pages in Chromium.
> 
> Does anyone have similar experiences or (in the best of cases) know of a 
> workaround?
> 

Hello!


Using Firefox 129.0 (64-bit) on Kubuntu 22.04.04 LTS.
Looking at system monitor/processes I see firefox-bin using about 729 MiB.
In system monitor/Application it's using 5,3 GiB.
I have five Fx windows open, each with at least five tabs open.

My WFH computer is an old HP z440 (12 × Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-1650 v3 @
3.50GHz, 62,7 GiB of RAM, Quadro K2200).

My office laptop is more modern, wrt to cpu, but has less RAM, 32 GB. 

Both are snappy with Firefox.

I also use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and about half a dozen other
extensions for quality of life. A list is available, if you want it to
compare with. I'm thinking uBO and PB may cut down on crud being downloaded
that may make the browser slower.

I do not use the snap-version, but rather the Mozilla Team-maintained deb-
variant.

Maybe give that a go and see how the services you mention behaves with the
debbed Firefox?

For myself, I've been using Google Chrome for ages, until I felt it got
slower and slower, using more and more RAM. About a year ago I got fed up
and decided to give Fx a go again. I don't regret that, as it felt very much
faster than Chrome ever did.

As usual, YMMV!


> -- 
> Sorin Srbu
> Drifttekniker, Serverdrift
> Karolinska Institutet Universitetsbibliotek
> Enheten för teknikstöd och bildproduktion,
> Avdelningen för Verksamhetsstöd
> Tele: 08-524 84166
> 
> 
> # They say you can't buy happiness, but you can buy a 
> # motorcycle, and that's pretty damn close!
> 
> 
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