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?
OpenBSD derives some security by confining processes and web browsing
with firefox is notorious for memory leaks.
If you mobo supports it, more ram will also improve performance with
firefox and other memory intensive tasks.
Other options:
Adding the Firefox "forget" widget to your panel
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/forget-button-quickly-delete-your-browsing-history
and using it frequently.
Under preference disable access to webcams, microphone etc.
Consider www/iridium as an alternative browser. You can export your
firefox bookmarks.html and import it into iridium. Although I do not
have solid numbers, I thought it was better in this regard than firefox.
--
J. Scott Heppler
