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.
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.
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";.
