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Firefox 113.0.1 performance after task limit gone?, change win10 performance setting to "background services"

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by mathesonre

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Since the task limit option seems to have been obliterated? I believe the many more "programs" and the events they create for windows to handle is causing all sorts of virtual memory problems. Changing win10 advanced system settings from performance for programs to background services seems to have restored Firefox performance in my case, see: 10 advanced system settings win10 advanced system settings performance programs vs background services Is there an about:config option that would allow one to achieve the same "programs" limiting option as before? This laptop has 16 gig of memory and I used to successfully have even better Firefox performance with windows virtual memory turned off, but eventually I would get crashes. I can understand why Firefox was modified in a way to better localize the source of crashes, but in my case it has degraded performance. Thanks Mozilla for a great product I have valued for years!!!!

Since the task limit option seems to have been obliterated? I believe the many more "programs" and the events they create for windows to handle is causing all sorts of virtual memory problems. Changing win10 advanced system settings from performance for programs to background services seems to have restored Firefox performance in my case, see: [http://win 10 advanced system settings win10 advanced system settings performance programs vs background services] Is there an about:config option that would allow one to achieve the same "programs" limiting option as before? This laptop has 16 gig of memory and I used to successfully have even better Firefox performance with windows virtual memory turned off, but eventually I would get crashes. I can understand why Firefox was modified in a way to better localize the source of crashes, but in my case it has degraded performance. Thanks Mozilla for a great product I have valued for years!!!!

All Replies (9)

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Is there a way to edit my post? I made a big mistake on the link above, please do not click it! It should have been:

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Firefox uses multiple processes/threads for another reason, to secure sites from corruption or snooping by other sites. You can use the built-in Firefox Task Manager page, about:processes (Shift+Esc) to see what each process is handling.

As for the question of whether Firefox has settings similar to system priority settings, I don't know what the exact comparison would be. When the developers have tried to reduce performance of inactive tabs so the active tab would perform better, people complained that their music streams playing in background windows/tabs became choppy or stopped. There still might be a setting to do that while they work out how to optimize it. But maybe that's the opposite of what you're looking for?

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Thanks for the help. I could not remember the term used for the Firefox performance option, it just disappeared. This post is just one example asking about it. [number of processes for Firefox 102.0.1esr with only one tab; How to reduce] " I also noticed under performance settings I can no longer specify the number of processes."

There are several other posts in this regard, the fact that in the Performance Settings, the number of processes setting disappeared as versions evolved, leading to many, many concurrent processes. Thanks for the security explanation, but unfortunately the high number of processes, with numerous tabs open, at least in windows, has very significant side effects. In my original post, my fix for the performance issues has other unfortunate side effects that I haven't even discovered yet. I cannot believe I missed all the posts on this topic in my search, got to hone my skills! But for now on my machine changing the windows advanced performance option to "background processes" made a very large improvement, Firefox was almost unusable before this change. Hope this helps others with the same performance issues.

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Having more content processes than in the past is because Fission is enabled by default in current releases. Fission is about a new site isolation architecture in Firefox and you will see more Firefox processes running than before.

You can find the current Fission state on the "Help -> More Troubleshooting Information" (about:support) page (search for Fission). When Fission is enabled you can no longer limit the number of content processes in "Settings -> Performance".

Modified by cor-el

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"When Fission is enabled you can no longer limit the number of content processes in "Settings -> Performance"."

I think the Advance Performance setting I suggest for Windows may be a hint at a performance problem introduced, at least for Windows, with the Fission introduction. Perhaps this is allowing far more javascripts to run virtually simultaneously, since it seems like maybe many more IFrames could be attempting to run as well? It has now been more than 20 years since I worked on windows development itself.

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I stumbled upon this post on the Malware Bytes Browser Guard site

Malware Bytes Browser Guard post regarding performance issues in Firefox. 103.0.1

During a performance problem per firefox task manager, "Extensions" had grabbed 4 Gigabytes of Memory, exactly the size of my max. virtual memory setting.

I have 5 Extensions, one being MalwareBytes

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MalwareBytes is disabled SharedWebProcess 110% CPU Over 8 GIG Ram Firefox.exe in a Page Fault Delta battle. 10 minutes to type this. Fission startup OFF https://share.firefox.dev/3MSY0Hg

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After the last post I killed SharedWebProcess with Firefox Task Manager and everything remains, all TABs appear to be fine and I typed this normally. Looking at Window Performance monitor. svchost.exe firefox.exe firefox.exe These three processes were battling it out with page faults. I have not learned how to use Firefox Task Manager, sorry!

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I have been away for a while [Result from Profiler while problem was occurring.] I will always use the term results from the Profiler, because just looking at the profiler one might get confused regarding ones own Firefox profile or the results produced by the profiler. In my previous post I didn't use the link insert mechanism. I hope this profiler result is useful in finding the WIN 10 performance issue with Firefox.

Modified by cor-el