Is it worth adding more memory?

[oldkettle]

9 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

I can try that, but the only things running are UBlock Origin and Flash Block plus, both of which are suggested as solutions to the high memory use problem by Mozilla themselves, so it seems unlikely that either would now start using memory when they haven't in the past.

Something is weird with the forum today - struggling to edit the quotes, the cursor gets inside the quoted part and then no text can be added outside.

 

I agree these two are supposed to make things better. All I am saying is it is easier to try a different page / safe mode than to reinstall the browser :-)

 

Edited to add:

I have opened my FF 58.01 about 45 minutes ago. It's created 7 processes that use quite a bit of memory but it has been stable so far.

Edited March 10, 2018 by oldkettle

[Jeremy Harris]

Right, I've just disabled every add-on and extension, restarted Firefox, and with just this tab open it's now at 600Mb and steadily increasing, exactly as it was before, so the problem is definitely Firefox itself, and specifically two Firefox process, PID 9204 and PID 9908.  Two other Firefox processes, PID 6148 and PID 9912 seem stable, with no memory increase over time that I can see.

[oldkettle]

4 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

Right, I've just disabled every add-on and extension, restarted Firefox, and with just this tab open it's now at 600Mb and steadily increasing, exactly as it was before, so the problem is definitely Firefox itself, and specifically two Firefox process, PID 9204 and PID 9908.  Two other Firefox processes, PID 6148 and PID 9912 seem stable, with no memory increase over time that I can see.

 

So - a different page may be?

 

I have opened the forum's Activity page in FF, not logged in though. Will see how it goes.

Edited March 10, 2018 by oldkettle

[Jeremy Harris]

1 minute ago, oldkettle said:

 

So - a different page may be?

 

 

I'll try it and report back, but I have a feeling it's an intrinsic issue within Firefox, especially as it seems to be a widely reported problem.

[Guest Alphonsox]

Apparently there is an about:memory page to get detailed memory usage information in Firefox.

 

[SteamyTea]

11 minutes ago, Alphonsox said:

about:memory

Shows what you are looking at, one to be careful with when posting up information

You can use it to clear up memory though.

Edited March 10, 2018 by SteamyTea

[ProDave]

24 minutes ago, Alphonsox said:

Apparently there is an about:memory page to get detailed memory usage information in Firefox.

 

Try the "minimise memory usage" button on that page.

 

FWIW my old version of pale moon is using about 600K of memory, has been on all day with 12 tabs open.

[Jeremy Harris]

52 minutes ago, Alphonsox said:

Apparently there is an about:memory page to get detailed memory usage information in Firefox.

 

 

 

25 minutes ago, ProDave said:

Try the "minimise memory usage" button on that page.

 

FWIW my old version of pale moon is using about 600K of memory, has been on all day with 12 tabs open.

 

Tried that, and it has a momentary effect, but the memory use soon starts climbing again (now over 1 Gb and rising, with just a blank tab having been open for the past ten or fifteen minutes.

 

I'm convinced there's a memory leak problem that Mozilla haven't been able to fix.  The advice seems to be to refresh, which is a PITA as you then need to reload any extensions you use.  It does provide respite, but it isn's a fix, it just takes you back to a relatively clean starting position.

 

I've also checked my profile size, and it's only a few hundred Mb, which seems about right.

 

I'd use Chromium (with the Google crap disabled) if it was easy to run on all platforms, but it isn't, unfortunately, the Windows builds are a bit haphazard, and I'd want something that is similar to Firefox, open source, works seamlessly on different OS's, and has a bookmark sync feature across different machines (this latter feature is very useful if you regularly use two or three different machines).

[oldkettle]

Well, this is odd. I've had FF open for nearly two hours now, I have logged in to the forum as well. The memory has started growing a couple of times but got trimmed automatically and is certainly not leaking. I don't have any add-ons or extensions in the profile I am running though (I use multiple profiles). Win7, 8GB RAM running in a VM.

 

Will upgrade to 58.02 out of interest.

[ragg987]

@jsharris, maybe back up your profile then do a clean install of FF to rule out some configuration or other issue first. You can always restore your personalisations of it does not help.

[Jeremy Harris]

12 minutes ago, ragg987 said:

@jsharris, maybe back up your profile then do a clean install of FF to rule out some configuration or other issue first. You can always restore your personalisations of it does not help.

 

 

Thanks, I did this early when I switched to Firefox 59.0 Beta, just saved my old profile, completely removed FF58, used CC Cleaner to clean out all the garbage left over, then installed FF59.0 as a fresh install, copying over just the chrome folder with my CSS customisations, to get the same look and feel.  I re-installed Ublock Origin and Flash Block (Plus) afterwards.  Resource monitor is still showing that the four Firefox processes are using a bit over 1Gb, and one of them is just getting bigger second by second, even when doing nothing at all.

 

I have found that installing the freeware application Wise Memory Optimiser works to knock back most of the Firefox memory grab.  Currently I have it set to auto optimise when free memory gets below 1.5Gb, and the little pop up tells me that it reduces memory use by around 0.5Gb every time it reaches this point.  Checking with resource manager shows that 99% of that saving comes from reducing Firefox memory use, almost all of it from the one process that is continually taking more memory.  This looks very much like a memory leak to me, as I can't think of any other easy explanation.  It has to be connected to the particular combination of Windows and Firefox, I think, as I don't see it on the other machines.  It may even be Win 7 specific, as I have no other version of Windows to compare it with, only Linux.

[Guest Alphonsox]

2 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

 It may even be Win 7 specific, as I have no other version of Windows to compare it with, only Linux.

 

It's not - My windows machine is Windows10 and I see exactly the same issues. The Linux machines are fine.

[Jeremy Harris]

5 minutes ago, Alphonsox said:

 

It's not - My windows machine is Windows10 and I see exactly the same issues. The Linux machines are fine.

 

 

Useful to know, thanks, particularly that you, like me, don't see the problem on Linux either.  Makes me think it has to be something specific with the FF/Windows combination, something that has been going on since at least FF58, and still happens with FF59 Beta.

[SteamyTea]

If you open up other applications i.e. Word, AutoCad, do they grab back some of the RAM from FF?

[Jeremy Harris]

17 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

If you open up other applications i.e. Word, AutoCad, do they grab back some of the RAM from FF?

 

 

It doesn't look like it.  AFAICS, the four FF processes don't seem to ever use less memory, they either stay fairly constant, or slowly use more memory as time goes on.  The odd thing is that one or two processes just continue to grow even when the machine is just sat, turned on, but apparently doing nothing.  The interesting thing is that FF memory use increases slowly when there is zero network traffic, which implies that FF is apparently using memory when there is no data coming in, which seems a bit bizarre.  The scale of memory use is also odd, as it massively exceeds the amount of data on even dozens of normal webpages.

[Gone West]

15 hours ago, JSHarris said:

 

I'd use Chromium (with the Google crap disabled) if it was easy to run on all platforms, but it isn't, unfortunately, the Windows builds are a bit haphazard, and I'd want something that is similar to Firefox, open source, works seamlessly on different OS's, and has a bookmark sync feature across different machines (this latter feature is very useful if you regularly use two or three different machines).

I got fed up with Firefox some time ago and now use Pale Moon with Xmarks.

[SteamyTea]

12 minutes ago, PeterStarck said:

I got fed up with Firefox some time ago

Think I must have as well, been using the SeaMoneky fork for a while now.

There are a lot of features I like about FireFox, but it seems to have been badly developed over the last few year.  Maybe it is time for Mozilla to think about starting again rather than just adding on features.

 

There seems to be about 10 browsers on Portable Apps. may give some a go.

[Jeremy Harris]

54 minutes ago, PeterStarck said:

I got fed up with Firefox some time ago and now use Pale Moon with Xmarks.

 

 

Thanks for that, I've used Pale Moon before, mainly because it uses a lot less resources than Firefox, but switched back because Firefox Sync is so useful if you use several different machines.  Personally I'd not trust Xmarks, having just checked on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmarks_Sync , but then I'm just a little paranoid about privacy.  However, Pale Moon Sync (https://www.palemoon.org/sync/ ) looks OK, and is encrypted, so may well do much the same as Xmarks without the privacy issues.

 

It's a while since I've used Pale Moon, as I only have an older version installed on an old netbook that runs XP, and I stopped using that a while ago (it was the only machine I had on site for a fair time, and was why I'd dug it out).  I'm going to try the current  version on both this Win7 machine and a Linux machine and see how well it runs, and how effective the sync feature is, and will report back later.

[Jeremy Harris]

45 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Think I must have as well, been using the SeaMoneky fork for a while now.

There are a lot of features I like about FireFox, but it seems to have been badly developed over the last few year.  Maybe it is time for Mozilla to think about starting again rather than just adding on features.

 

There seems to be about 10 browsers on Portable Apps. may give some a go.

 

 

There's a portable version of Pale Moon I've just found: https://www.palemoon.org/palemoon-portable.shtml

[Jeremy Harris]

I've now installed the latest 64 bit version of Pale Moon on both the Win7 machine and a Linux machine, and the built-in encrypted sync function seems to work in very much the same way as that in Firefox.  Bookmarks etc are all synced quickly and the sync set up is no more hassle than that for Firefox Sync.

 

The really good news is that Pale Moon looks as Firefox used to, in fact it looks EXACTLY the same as Firefox 58/59 Beta looked after I'd played around editing a CSS file to force it to look acceptable, i.e before Firefox switched to the harder to use Australis theme, and before Quantum was released that stopped the classic theme restorer add-on from working. 

 

In terms of memory use, then in Win7 (I'm currently typing this on a Linux machine) then Pale Moon seems to use a single process, rather than 4 or 5, and runs at around 300 to 400Mb, with no indication of any steady and continuous memory leak increasing that usage.

 

Next stage is to see how it behaves with Ublock Origin and Flash Block (Plus), or whether there are alternatives.  Overall I'm impressed.  I'd only used the much older 32 bit version on my old WinXP netbook before, but running on a reasonably fast Core i7 Linux laptop (that only has an SSD for storage) it is very snappy indeed when compared to Firefox.

[SteamyTea]

IronPortable is Chromium, rather than Chrome, and can share bookmarks across machines.

[Jeremy Harris]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

IronPortable is Chromium, rather than Chrome, and can share bookmarks across machines.

 

 

But unfortunately it's a Windows-only application.  Most of my machines run Linux, either Mint or Lubuntu, and only one of them runs Windows, so any browser really has to work across all platforms and allow synchronising of bookmarks etc to work.

 

Right now Pale Moon looks to be working well, it's much faster than Firefox 58/59 Beta in terms of pages load times, synchronisation seems to work well as far as I can tell, and it's using far less memory, AFAICT from just the limited testing I've done so far.  It'll be interesting to see how well it works on the lowest powered machine I have, an old Mini-ITX box I built years ago that runs on an old dual core 64 bit Atom (a fanless D525MW board that has real serial and LPT ports), albeit with 4Gb of RAM and an SSD.  Running Lubuntu on that is fine, but Firefox was a bit sluggish.  I suspect that it may well handle Pale Moon a fair bit better.

[Gone West]

5 hours ago, JSHarris said:

 

The really good news is that Pale Moon looks as Firefox used to, in fact it looks EXACTLY the same as Firefox 58/59 Beta looked after I'd played around editing a CSS file to force it to look acceptable, i.e before Firefox switched to the harder to use Australis theme, and before Quantum was released that stopped the classic theme restorer add-on from working. 

 

I stopped using Firefox because at every update it seemed to be trying to look like Chrome and I liked the look of the old Firefox. I started using Xmarks when it was Foxmarks and just carried on when it was commercialised.

[SteamyTea]

4 hours ago, JSHarris said:

But unfortunately it's a Windows-only application. 

Not tried it recently, but Chromium works on Linux.

I tried PaleMoon, can't remember why I stopped using it, probably something in there that narked me.

[Jeremy Harris]

7 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Not tried it recently, but Chromium works on Linux.

I tried PaleMoon, can't remember why I stopped using it, probably something in there that narked me.

 

 

Yes, it's primarily a Linux development, but the ports to Windows for Chromium are flaky, I found, and not really being actively developed much.  AFAIK, there's no easy way to sync Chromium on Linux with Chromium on Windows, either.  It seems all the work is going in to Chrome, but that has so much Google proprietary stuff in it that I wouldn't use it.

 

It's worth having another look at Pale Moon, though, I've been playing with it all afternoon and it's still pretty snappy and isn't using loads of memory.  The only slight downside is that it's a bit more hassle to load add-ins, as a lot of Firefox add-ins don't work and the Pale Moon add-ins site is pretty hopeless, IMHO.  I ended up having to grab a .xpi file from Github to get one add-in loaded, for example.