this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024

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How can I quickly "unclog" firefox when it runs out of memory (with 1000/2000 tabs) (youtu.be)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, Once in a while I try to clean up my tabs. First thing I do is use "merge all windows" to put all tabs into one window.

This often causes a memory clog and firefox get stuck in this state for 10-20 minutes

I have recorded one such instance.

I have tried using the "discard all tabs" addon, unfortunately, it is also getting frozen by the memory clog.

Sometimes I will just reboot my PC as that is faster.

Unfortunately, killing firefox this way, does not save the new tab order, so when I start firefox again, it will have 20+ windows open, which I again, merge all pages and then it clogs again !

So far the only solution I have found is just wait the 20 minutes.

Once the "memory clog" is passed, it runs just fine.

I would like better control over tab discard. and maybe some way of limitting bloat. For instance, I would rather keep a lower number of undiscarded youtube that as they seem to be insanely bloated.

In other cases, for most website I would like to never discard the contents.

In my ideal world, I would like the tabs to get frozen and saved to disk permanently, rather than assuming discard tabs can be reloaded. As if the websites were going to exist forever and discarding a tab is like cleaning a cache.

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Maybe don’t have a THOUSAND tabs

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (10 children)

geez, just press Ctrl+W when you're done with a tab, or if the tab is older than a couple hours

I don't understand why some are so attached to tabs. Search your history if you need it again.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (13 children)

I terminate Firefox and reopen it any time it's chewing up my RAM, but I usually don't have more than 500 tabs open at any one time. My tabs persist when Firefox starts again, but tabs don't fully load until I click on them again. This saves my memory from getting chewed up immediately, and can usually go a week or so before I need to do it again.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (8 children)

1000 tabs? What for?

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (6 children)

I'm really curious about the workflow you have that needs that many tabs. How does the History and Bookmark functions fall short of what you need?

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 8 months ago (10 children)

If you need quick access to this many pages I suggest organizing bookmarks. As this is what they are meant for. Tabs are meant for active pages you are working with. So anytime you get that many tabs with any browser its gonna run like shit.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (1 children)

A tab suspender extension might help some, but there's only so much you can do to minimize the impact of thousand(s) of tabs. Cleaning out old tabs more frequently is probably a better habit.

[+] [email protected] -10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I tried a tab suspender, but it would replace tabs with a moz:// address that would end up breaking all my tabs when I copy & pasted them from a text file. Also tab suspender doesn't work once firefox gets into that state. I think the internal scheduler is trying to load tabs and discarding them as fast as possible. What I need is a big "stop button" that stop it all from at least trying to load new tabs.

I think what's happenning is when I merge all windows, many gets get woken up and, like the youtube tabs they seem to gobble up 2 to 4 gb of ram while initializing to that freezes everything.

It's making it really hard to get to 10k 20k tabs when it really falls apart like that with not even 2k tabs.

This makes the browser experience really bogged down where most of the time is spent finishing and closing tabs instead of just getting on with the actual task.

I would really like to spend less time fiddling with my browser and it "just working".

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (6 children)

20k tabs? I struggle to see how someone could go through that many tabs, even over a long period of time. Your workflow is something the browser was never made to handle.

Try some popular non-Mozilla tab suspend extensions. I doubt that they all operate the same way.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

I’m sorry I don’t have an answer

Elmo fire gif

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/Tggq4jPPZaA

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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