On Sat, Jul 06, 2019 at 01:10:08PM +0200, Richard Ulmer wrote:
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!
Beware that a setting of 2 might hurt responsiveness too much, which
translates into hiccups of 1-3 seconds, during which Firefox is
unresponsive. I've settled for 4 on my old system with 8GB of RAM and
a dual-core CPU.
One more thing I've discovered in the mean time... I use Deezer, which
is one of those heavy web apps that can't be replaced without lots of
hacking and reverse-engineering. So what I do to alleviate the RAM
leaks is to refresh the deezer.com web app with Ctrl-Shift-R from time
to time. Once every few hours, this frees lots of RAM from a couple of
Firefox processes, usually about 2GB. YMMV
