Close everything and start fresh
Your productivity shouldn't rely on keeping one piece of software running for long periods of time.
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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Yes it happens. As others have said: just restart.
What might not be as clear: when you restart, if it doesn't just come up and offer to restore your session, you can go to History and Restore Previous Session. This reopens all your tabs (actually, they won't fully reload until you view them).
Or just use bookmarks like a normal person
Bookmarks are for really important stuff. Open tabs are for stuff I want to be able to easily stumble back upon, but I won't be butthurt if I dont.
There's nothing wrong with having more than one way to categorize stuff.
Edit: and considering that session data is also written to disk, there really isn't much difference between bookmarks and open tabs anyway.
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Only the part with youtube. Don't know if they are pulling some tricks on uBlock users, but about 10 tabs of youtube can get nasty, even with a somewhat recent workstation.
Most software in general has hard to detect issues after several weeks of uptime. Its something that's fundamentally hard to test and fix. Its a big reason why "did you turn it off and on again" is such universal advice.
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Dawg I had like ~35 tabs open and hadn't restarted my PC in over three weeks. Fucking Firefox was sucking back 80 gigs of RAM. 80 fucking gigs.
On the bright side all the tabs were still loaded when I clicked through them.
I've seen poorly made websites taking gigabytes of RAM before. It's not firefox' fault they do that.
True that, I just thought it was crazy. I had recently upgraded to 96 gigs of RAM and I just never imagined a browser would actually suck up that much.
If you had 80GB worth of websites that did something actually useful with it, you'd want Firefox to use it all.
I usually have dozens of tabs loaded due to usage and I want Firefox to keep all of them into memory so that I can switch between them quicker.
Though I do also want Firefox to shed load by unloading some of them whe I need memory for something else. There just simply isn't a mechanism in Linux to do that AFAIK; Firefox will happily keep all of its tabs loaded all the way until OOM eventhough it could shed most of them with little impact on user experience. There isn't a way for the kernel to ask applications to shed memory load on their own and I think there should be.
macOS has such a mechanism and Firefox uses it but it didn't have much effect IME, so it might have been bugged. That was a good while ago that I tested it though.
Edit: I just found out that there actually is a sort of standard mechanism now: https://systemd.io/MEMORY_PRESSURE/
I don't think firefox implements it but it's also kinda new.
I can't wait for Servo to be finished so I can move away from Firefox, it uses way too much memory.
I'm so hyped as well! Just read their monthly update blog today actually! I'm mostly hyped because it's the first actual new web browser in a very, very long time, and that's just plain exciting!
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Servo won't protect you against shitty websites gobbling up memory.
It will still lower memory usage considerably, Firefox uses way more memory than Chrome. Memory optimization is horrible in Firefox.
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This is some S tier trolling.
What?
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/
I've got more than 30 open tabs, though in practice I don't actually need ALL those tabs loaded. The extension unloads inactive tabs after a configurable time. You can also configure the extension so that pinned tabs are not unloaded, certain domains/URL patterns are not unloaded, etc.
That's a healthy solution
Firefox can automatically discard tabs when available memory gets too short. You need to configure it to do that though and probably disable the 10min minimum open time too if you're very short on memory.
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Check the RAM usage of each tab. My Firefox is constantly open at work, albeit with anywhere from 1-10 tabs, and it never gets slow. Only time I restart it is when Firefox updates.
I don't hold anything against you, OP, but... 30 tabs open for two weeks makes me feel yucky on the inside.
Hahajahajaha
I have like 90?
Sorry, eh. (Yea, I know I shouldn't, but I'm lazy)
Lol I open them to look at later, and I also open lots songs on youtube to listen to and switch between songs rather than reopen the songs over and over I just keep it open.
Oh, the 20 tabs thing is perfectly reasonable. But I'm one of those crazy people who completely shuts down his computer every night, including closing my browser. Been using computers for too many years to trust a browser to not leak memory.
You can bookmark webpages to come back to later and even organize them in trees by category. You can ceeate a playlist of songs from youtube and import it to a service with no ads like piped, then shuffle it. If you're willing to put up with 30+ open tabs these are much less time consuming than scrolling through the default way it situates tabs, AND there aren't 30 open tabs sucking your resources.
If you already knew all this, I'm almost sorry.
I'm almost sorry
Hahahahaha oh boy the comments here today are great!
(I'm one of those who never reboots, never closes Firefox).
Personally, if I bookmark something, the odds of ever getting back to it are very, very low, and so are the odds of deleting obsolete bookmarks of unread news etc. But the songs tips are great, I'll have to look into it, thank you!
And 30 tabs is very tame.
I do have bookmarks for music too, I used to open more than 30. I now bookmark lot of them. Trying to reduce numbers of tabs little by little, I used to open so many tabs that I got an arrow and had to press it to reach the other tabs.
I am still sane compared to these people:
https://libreddit.projectsegfau.lt/r/chrome/comments/ev9fi9/so_how_many_tabs_do_you_have_open
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You can see the worst offenders in firefox by using the hamburger menu then more tools and Task manager. You can sort by ram. YouTube likes to hold gigs of ram for some videos. Close the biggest offenders and you'll get back close to normal speed.
Ding ding ding, the only good reply in this thread.
The symptoms described by OP smell like good old memory exhaustion.
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I had the same problem recently. Especially the youtube UI became very unresponsive and would take several seconds to respond. I have 96G ram...
I downloaded ESR instead. So far so good.
I've had this for years, I just exit and restart.