Firefox 37.x: High memory use?

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I just migrated to Win 8.1/64 and switched to FF 37. I run with a lot of tabs open (currently 67).

In old FF 3.6.28, it took about 400MB to start FF with the same number of tabs (using Bartab on both systems (actually Bartab Heavy on the FF37 system), so most tabs are unloaded at startup).

In FF 37, almost 1GB! of memory is consumed by FF after starting and before doing anything. Are others having similar experiences?

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I have 1 FF37.0.2 window open with 8 tabs/pages and a 2nd window with 1 page and show about 390MB in Task Manager.

Before you wonder "Am I doing things right," ask "Am I doing the right things?"

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I have FF 37.0.2 and 12 tabs, 1500MB.

cheers, Paul

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One of the reasons why I prefer IE – much less demand.

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FF 37.0.2 and 13 tabs – ~460Mb. YMMV

Eliminate spare time: start programming PowerShell

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…using Bartab on both systems…

Check out https://philikon.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/the-future-of-bartab/

And from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/bartab/ “Works with Firefox 3.5 – 4.0b6” and “This add-on is, for now, no longer being maintained.”

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Check out https://philikon.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/the-future-of-bartab/

And from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/bartab/ “Works with Firefox 3.5 – 4.0b6” and “This add-on is, for now, no longer being maintained.”

Yes, aware of those. That is why I am using Bartab HEAVY (which was being updated (still is?).

And it works. FF loads MUCH faster with many tabs than w/o Bartab.

It’s a shame that FF developers don[t focus on real browser improvement, like incorporating things like Bartab into the code base. Instead they waste their time mimicking and following in the footsteps of Google’s Chrome browser and playing with eye candy. Which might explain why FF browser usage is down to about 10% and still falling.

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After re-starting FF it’s now 310MB.

cheers, Paul

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Personally, I’ve given up on Firefox 37.x because of the crashes which I get on quite normal webpages like the BBC News and the Guardian (UK newspaper), among others.

I didn’t get these with V36 and below, nor with v38 beta 9 (which I installed in desperation).
And that’s with quite a number of add-ins, including the excellent “memory friendly” uBlock, which for me replaced AdBlock Plus.

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Can one tell how much of the browser’s memory is being used by the adblocker extension?

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https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/about-addons-memory/?src=ss

Adds an about:addons-memory page that details add-on memory usage – meaning you type about:addons-memory in the URL bar.

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https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/about-addons-memory/?src=ss

Adds an about:addons-memory page that details add-on memory usage – meaning you type about:addons-memory in the URL bar.

Yes, had already installed this. Could not figure out how to read it. Maybe have to spend more time with it?

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I don’t remember the last FF crash I had, although there are always a few sites that don’t play nicely.

I don’t know of a way to tell which extension is using memory, but the Firefox forums might have some insight.

cheers, Paul

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I would suspect add-ons…Adblock Plus is known for consuming lots of resources.

I would recommend disabling add-ons one by one to see if it changes.

I found an interesting article via the Mozilla Forums on Paul T’s suggestion…
https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/
I tried the test suggested by using the VIM Color Scheme Test and Task Manager showed 21%/250 MB with no Adblock Plus and 40%/1780MB with it on.
There was much less used with uBlock, 23%/440MB.

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Please refer to: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/about-addons-memory/?src=ss

about:addons-memory
About this Add-on
about:addons-memory provides an experimental about: page for advanced users to display some memory usage statistics about their add-ons.

To use, open about:addons-memory in a new tab.

Dear press,
no, it is not OK to install this add-on along with the Top 20 or something add-ons and publish articles singling out the “biggest memory wasters” or something along the lines of this. This is wrong, superficial, sensationalist and outright wrong.
Adblock Plus, being the most popular add-on, using 20-30 MB of memory is not a problem. Add-ons that may use hundreds of mega bytes of memory with steadily growing memory usage *may* be a problem and this add-on is intended to find exactly these kinds of issues more easily.

Anyway, do you really need thousands of ads popping up? I don’t.

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FF 37.0.2, 18 tabs (each with pictures), less than 600 Megs. I use Adblock Plus 2.6.9.

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After a week of running with ABP I’m only on 370MB. I think the answer is “it depends”.

cheers, Paul

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Do you have the browser cache stored in memory or on disk? If in memory, response time will be faster but it will obviously use more memory. In about:config, type in browser.cache and look at the entries.
To have the cache on disk you would need browser.cache.disk.enable set to true, browser.cache.disk capacity set to whatever you want to give it, and browser.cache.memory.enable set to false. To have the cache in memory, set browser.cache.disk.enable to false, browser.cache.memory.enable to true, and browser.cache.memory.capacity to whatever you want to give it. Or you can set this to -1, which will use whatever memory is available at the time.

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Do you have the browser cache stored in memory or on disk? If in memory, response time will be faster but it will obviously use more memory. In about:config, type in browser.cache and look at the entries.
To have the cache on disk you would need browser.cache.disk.enable set to true, browser.cache.disk capacity set to whatever you want to give it, and browser.cache.memory.enable set to false. To have the cache in memory, set browser.cache.disk.enable to false, browser.cache.memory.enable to true, and browser.cache.memory.capacity to whatever you want to give it. Or you can set this to -1, which will use whatever memory is available at the time.

I did have disk.enable set to TRUE but I also had memory.enable also set to TRUE.

Unsure if this causes any conflict.

So I flipped memory.enable to FALSE. Let’s see if that makes any difference.

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