this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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Firefox

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Does Firefox have a memory Leak? Crashes after being open for too long. (kbin.social)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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To preface, I have had a thread about this previously,

https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/840667/How-can-you-troubleshoot-a-crash-from-freezing

Ultimately, it didn't result in much.

Cue a few months, a lot has happened, and I have a new PC. Different graphics card vendor, different RAM, different motherboard vendor. Almost everything is different.

The crashes stopped, in fact I didn't notice them for a long time.

Past few days however, I noticed youtube videos starting to skip a bit. Thought it might just be youtube.

Then today happened. After about a month, I had a crash again. The PC has been left on for about a week (which is not really uncommon for me).

What I noticed that caught my eye...is that when i went to close it in task manager, it was using 14 GB. Just to be fair, I made sure before completing this post that I kicked every tab I had open out of inactive.

They are currently sitting at 5 GB.

What is occurring that is causing Firefox, under the same amount of active tabs (in fact possibly more, since I do have auto tab discard, so most of these tabs would not usually be active) to reach 3x the amount of ram they actually use?

I would like to get it to stop crashing, but it seems like even under a different hardware configuration, all I've done is make it take longer for it to actually happen, which makes me think even more that the it's an issue with memory.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Update: So far i'm down to 2 extensions:
Ublock
600% sound volume

Memory still ballooned from 1GB to 5GB.

When I checked processes before closing, even after force unloading Youtube under processes, GPU was using around 1 GB. There was literally nothing else I could unload that would stop this.

Again I loaded all tabs just to be fair...GPU is using half of that currently. I'm also questioning the reliability of about:processes to an extent, because I couldn't actually see what was adding up to the 5 GB I was seeing in task manager.

I also tried some advice I saw to just whitelist youtube, as it sounds like google does something regarding adblockers. But this did not seem to do anything noticable.

edit: based on another post, trying troubleshoot mode, though i'm always uncomfortable having all site blockers (ublock now) turned off.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Instead of asking here, please open a bug report

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't know how to do that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi

Create an account, select Firefox, and enter all the required info. In Firefox under "about firefox" you can get the version info.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

My system is always on sleep when I turn my PC off and Firefox is always open. I close Firefox from system update to system update and it hasn't crashed on me for quite a long time. Hopefully this doesn't change.

Inactive tabs shouldn't cause a problem but you can use something like Simple Tab Groups to prevent them to stack too much, might help.

Having a bigger swap partition also might help, if you have 16 GB RAM.

Edit: Also just like others mentioned, try to run Firefox without any add-ons to see if that happens again. You can also do this in reverse, deactivating your add-ons one by one and use Firefox like that for a while, until the occurrence stops.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

No idea what's actually happening, but it might also be one of the pages/sites using more and more resources wothout proper cleanup.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago

If that happens again, open about:processes in a new tab (type into URL bar), and sort by memory. Take a screenshot, redact private things, and if you upload it here, it would be easier to help. Chances are it's a specific website that consumes that much RAM, or an addon

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Can you share a list of the browser add-ons you're using, and if possible/not confidential the tabs you have open? Or at least the number of tabs?

Would make troubleshooting easier.

Also, is it a plain Firefox or any fork?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

'Improve Youtube!'
600% sound volume
7TV
Auto Tab Discard
Better TTV
Libredirect
LiveTL
Privacy Badger
Tampermonkey (No scripts enabled)
Ublock
User-Agent Switcher and Manager

i'd say about 40 tabs, mix of:
Danbooru
Youtube
Kbin
Reddit
Amazon
game8.co
libreddit

Plain Firefox

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, that many (dare I say sketchy) plugins, I'd decisively recommend seeing if you can reproduce the issue without them

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

To start Firefox without any plugins loaded, go from

Menu > Help > Troubleshoot Mode...
[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Probably not your problem unless you use Twitch constantly. But for me 7tv and BetterTV crashed Firefox all the time. Any streamer with 5k+ active chatters destroyed my browsing session with those two. I decided to remove them and rely on chatterino

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

I've never seen Firefox use that much memory, even with lots of tabs open for weeks. Maybe you have an extension that's causing issues.