EVERYONE Please Note

• Original Thread
  rather bloated thread which you may wish to refer to is this one
  Firefox devouring 2 gis of RAM, context menu getting slow /questions/976131
• Single Question per thread
  It would be appreciated if you would only post with possible solutions after reading carefully the post above and the original thread. Please do NOT post a metoo saying you have a similar problem, unless one of the helpers specifically asks for this.(And even then it may be best in a new separate thread)
• I have the same problem
  If you wish to register your own similar problems could I request you to
  • look at my post in the old thread /questions/976131?page=2#answer-506918 and read the instructions about starting your own thread. Please USE special link to ask a question.
  • note I propose we will now use that thread as a control thread to track the individual additional problems.
  • VOTE / Subscribe.
    Feel free to vote there is a helpful [Yes] [No]button alongside each post.
    metoo voters may use the button at the bottom of the thread [I have this problem too]
    The thread may be subscribed to by rss or email. Look towards the top right margin for [Question Tools][V](click the arrowhead) and subscribe by email or rss.

Public Forum (these are not private support tickets)
If you normally use emails but wish to follow your own posts on the forum use link

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions?filter=my-contributions

Note other display, sort and filter options are available from there.

Finally
I must try to explain memory an CPU usage problems tend to be complicated to troubleshoot, but there are some general tips

• Firefox uses too much memory or CPU resources - How to fix
• Firefox uses too much memory or CPU resources - How to fix

but a lot of hard slog is needed and cooperation of the person asking and the team trying to help.

The guidelines ask that you try to ask your own question in your own post. If you would try to do that please it makes it a lot easier for everyone trying to follow what is going on.

• Threads that get solved will get cross linked back to the control thread and the information so no one should miss out on any discoveries.
• Bugs when we need to file bugs we need to try to ensure they are filed with full information and Steps To Reproduce. Otherwise they are likely to be ignored,or marked incomplete and just waste the time of bugs triargers.

StaxOnRax,
I will comment further later, and ensure that by Monday this is escalated so we do not lose track of it.

Other Contributors
Don't be shy if you have a solution or need more information post away.

StaxOnRas

I will bow out of the discussions for a while so as to let other contributors freely comment and try help you. Someone may have great insight or a novel suggestion. Or even be able to get Mozilla developers with expert knowledge of Memory and Addons to participate in the troubleshooting.

I would say the crux of the matter is that in the other thread you had something in excess of 70 addons. That must give many millions of combinations to check out. I would suggest and the-edmeister suggested that you use profiles to tightly control these.

I would suggest your current situation with that number of addons will remain unsolvable I suspect the problem is not so much a Firefox one as a masses of addons one.

• By all means keep your old profile with 70+ addons, but disable as many addons as possible and use it sparingly.
• Create other profiles for specific task with only the extensions they require and all plugins disabled when not in use.

Hopefully that will let you get through day-to-day tasks without problems.

• If you do have problems it will be easier to troubleshoot with the reduced profiles.

Note if you do try to identify problem extensions etc is likely to be complicated by interactions between them but when looking for problems bisection methods are probably the best way of identifying the culprit. Divide the list in half. If you are looking for a bad performance discard the half that works and test with half of the bad half, and repeat. With 70 addons to test it only takes about 7 steps instead of the 69 of testing each single one separately in turn. The cuts are like this

35 or 35
17 or 18
9 or 9
4 or 5
2 or 3
2 or 1
bingo 

Besides the problem of the combinations of addons, you may also have particular websites or the operations on those websites that cause problems. For instance I commented in the other thread I note the above shows a lot of your memory being used in relation to http://yosh.katbox.net/comic/ & http://disqus.com

Thread is marked for escalation now,good luck.

Thanks alot for the escalation John :)

My old profile from the old thread isnt used anymore and ive been planning on deleting it since it was extremely problematic and it hasnt been touched since i made the current one.

All current issues that im describing in this thread are on the new fresh profile that i was told to make, and after i made this profile i made sure not to tamper with any of the addons i currently i have so that i dont cause a user error. In the profile i have now it could only be described as necessary addons if i were to give it a name, anything i dont need or has no use isnt there, its 36 in total addons if im not mistaken, not the 70+ addons i had before. All fairly popular ones too, if the problem is from one of them, then i guess the developer of it should be alerted about it? :/ Ive tried sticking to addons from well known developers for the most part.

Im not sure if its any help or much but the most common websites that i visit are:

http://makeuseof.com/

http://old.spring.me/

mail.yahoo.com

gmail.com

and http://facebook.com/

Ofcourse those arent the only ones but the most ones i frequent on a daily basis and the ones that seem to always be opened around the times said issues happen.

Im not sure of other apps can interfere with Firefox but the other apps i usually have open along with Firefox usually are:

uTorrent, Thunderbird, BlueStacks, VMWare, AIMP3 (a music player), Skype, Process Explorer, and Notepad++, and also sometimes theres a window from the DownThemAll! Firefox extension open.

I dont know what else to add that could possibly give more insight into this other than i recall all these issues starting to happen soon after i updated to Firefox 24

If theres anything thats needed to know about my PC or absolutely anything id be more than glad to say because the sooner this odd behavior of Firefox can end >.<

Yes it has improved. You seem to be down to 49 addons now.

Not sure what the metrics are. We probably have some from telemetry and someone has bound to have done some sort of survey at sometime. I do know from subjective experience on this forum that you are onthe high side. In fact I would say you have way more addons installed than the average Firefox user.

To make them more visible. Your details from aside:

Installed Plug-ins

1. Shockwave Flash 11.9 r900
2. Next Generation Java Plug-in 10.4.0 for Mozilla browsers
3. NPRuntime Script Plug-in Library for Java(TM) Deploy
4. 5.1.20513.0
5. Adobe Shockwave for Director Netscape plug-in, version 11.6.6.636
6. VLC media player Web Plugin 2.0.2
7. Unity Player 3.5.4f1
8. Yahoo Application State Plugin version 1.0.0.7
9. Adobe Shockwave for Director Netscape plug-in, version 11.5.9.620
10. The QuickTime Plugin allows you to view a wide variety of multimedia content in Web pages. For more information, visit the QuickTime Web site.

[10 plugins]

1. Adblock Plus 2.4
2. BugMeNot 2.2
3. bypassRDTO 2.4
4. Download Panel Tweaker 0.1.0
5. DownThemAll! 2.0.16
6. DownThemAll! AntiContainer 1.2.3
7. Flagfox 4.2.15
8. Flash and Video Download 1.43
9. Fun Characters 1.0
10. Google Reverse Image Search 1.0
11. Google Similar Images 0.5
12. Google Translator for Firefox 2.1.0.3
13. Google/Yandex search link fix 1.4.1
14. Greasemonkey 1.12
15. gTranslate 0.9
16. gTranslator 1.0.4
17. ImgLikeOpera 0.6.23
18. LastPass 2.0.20
19. Lazarus: Form Recovery 2.3
20. Moment 1.1.0
21. Mozilla Archive Format 3.0.0
22. NetVideoHunter 1.9.5
23. Omnibar 0.7.19.20130418
24. Omnibar Plus 1.0.14
25. PDF Viewer 0.8.649
26. RightToClick 2.9.5
27. SeenBlock 1.0.9
28. Session Manager 0.8.0.8
29. SkipScreen 0.7.2
30. Stylish 1.4.0
31. TinEye Reverse Image Search 1.1
32. Troubleshooter 1.1a
33. Undo Close Tab Replacement 7
34. WOT 20131030

[34 Active Extensions]

Clean Links 2.4.5 (Inactive)
DVDVideoSoft YouTube MP3 and Video Download 4.3.3.15 (Inactive)
Save Text To File 2.0.4 (Inactive)
Skype Click to Call 6.12.0.13601 (Inactive)
SmartVideo For YouTube 0.978 (Inactive) 
[5 Inactive]

[49 addons total]

Trying to say some thing constructive that may help if addon or memory experts get consulted. It may be worth leaving Firefox running and every day taking an about:memory result and saving it as a gziped file before and after trying the reduce memory buttons within about memory.

That will give you hard evidence of the build up of memory usage. It will allow you to clearly demonstrate the effect of the reduced memory button. It will also be evidence that may be looked at in detail if required in support of your observation that Firefox is not releasing memory. With rock solid evidence of what is used where.

I suspect that sort of evidence may be something that could be used if filing a bug on the problem. HOWEVER I suspect a bug would really only be investigated and dealt with if you had results like that from Firefox with a minimal numberof addons.

You may be interested in this post in a developers mailing list. I did try to post a comment myself. I tried to ask if SUMO data would help, but I guess it was considered off topic. That is a tightly moderated list and I am not a developer. I doubt they are have much interest in day to day users problems.

• Reacting more strongly to low-memory situations in Firefox 25
  https://groups.google.com/forum/?from.../5YM34Z9AQkM

I get the same exact case as what Bass posted! it climbs to a certain usage number and stabilizes there, for me its around 1.1GB (until it starts going bananas again that is)

I know i should reduce my post rate and wait for the paid mozilla support members but (and i know ive posted alot of these) does this memory report say much about the site im using? maybe the RAM usage is all coming from them? https://app.box.com/s/i0qajruq6vu8wlrs8wl6 and heres one after hitting reduce memory https://app.box.com/s/jyfxntgo1ljatcyzhc0v

I have telemetry, crash reporter and health check enabled so hopefully the devs in that thread might notice my case :/ Its the 3rd day in with firefox open and so far firefox hasnt crashed on itself or gone to the point it needs to be killed with a task manager, if it can last this way till say the second week (14th of this month i guess) and get no other replies here i guess i have to try my luck with the bug report... albeit im no dev so theres a small if any chance of anyone caring.

StaxOnRax,

I get the same exact case as what Bass posted!

Where is that  ? Let's keep the post's separate but cross link them.

I am still hoping the new help desk staff are going to comment further, but I am sure they are very busy it may take a day or two more yet.

Im not sure exactly how to cross link from there or link to only one post but i believe this is the post? https://groups.google.com/d/msg/firefox-dev/5YM34Z9AQkM/ds1Q3RTzEsAJ The part about it stabilizing at a certain number is what i meant.

Not much we can do about cross linking there. The new firefox-dev.
I tried to post in that forum recently and my post was obviously rejected.

I was trying to ask if SUMO (SUpport.MOzilla.org) 'this forum could help by providing info from forum threads. (Threads like like this one of yours for example. On topic from my perspective because of their thread Reacting more strongly to low-memory situations in Firefox 25 )

(I also politely pointed our the search facility here is ****, so they would do better relying on contributors rather than on search results )

Not sure the paid new HelpDesk has much time yet for even looking at never mind solving difficult questions.

May I suggest you post back in another two or three of days if no one else has taken this up, and I will see what I can do. To me this looks like just the sort of thread the new helpdesk should be interested in getting involved in. With it being new procedures and expectations are rather unclear at the moment.

I think at this rate the only thing i can do is downgrade back to Firefox 23. I apologize for saying this but Mozilla's support is horseshit to say the least.

I appreciate all the help the volunteers and the time they gave trying to help me out here, but i cant keep suffering with a browser like this. even if an older version means more of a security risk atleast i have something thats usable, since my last message here Firefox has been doing all sorts of oddities such as freezing up randomly after i write something (even though the RAM is normal) and giving me the crash message, and basically all the things it used to do before i created a new profile in the old thread.

Heres me hoping after the downgrade the issues dont persist somehow

Sorry we have dropped the ball on this thread, and you are not getting the attention you deserve.

I have not re-read the threads but will make a couple of points without doing so

1. The new escalation system had a mishap. This is one of the threads where the escalation tag was cleared in an automated damage limitation procedure. I have just now manually re-added the tag.
2. I am not sure Fx 23 is itself likely to help. Did Fx 24 work any better ?
   • Consider Fx24 ESR if Fx 24 was ok. That is unofficial advise but gives you a secure version to test with.
   • If you try Fx23 secure be aware it is not supported or secure, Fx17esr may be a slightly better bet.
   • Personally if I was in your situation I would go for
     • a second Version Fx17 esr as an additional custom install and with its own separate profile.
     • Or the easier option of the third party Firefox Portable Fx24esr. Again as an additional browser.

Hopefully HelpDesk will get on this thread this week sometime.

So official Mozilla staff havent seen this thread even? strange...

For now ill see if its working normally for me on Fireofx23 first, if all goes well ill move up to 24, as i really dont like using an unmaintained old version of a browser its only a matter of time till i move to it anyways

Btw, isnt the ESR of firefox only for companies and organizations that make agreements with firefox to get it? ive never seen it publicly available on the Firefox site...

Also, worth mentioning i suppose, today i did a clean install of Windows on another partition and thats what im using for now for firefox. I really want to reduce whatever chance of anything thats tampering worth Firefox to nothing (it had preinstalled windows from HP so maybe that could be it?)

StaxOnRax,
I will deal with the escalation problem first, then answer your actual points in a second post.

I will start a contributors discussion thread on the subject of escalating unsolved threads and HelpDesk's involvement using this as a specific example. Let's see if that helps by giving the thread additional attention as an example of the use of escalation tags.

I must of course point out again that the HelpDesk and escalation methods are new and intended to improve how we help. Teething troubles are to be expected in any rollout. The escalation procedure may need refining, and as is it is probably overwhelming the new HelpDesk .

Sumarising salient points, as I understand it

• N.B
  • Maybe HelpDesk has decided already that time can not be devoted to this specific thread. It is up to the OP to continue testing with fewer addons. If so please say so explictly within the AAQ thread? - Thanks ~J99
  • IMHO This may be considered a good example of the potential failings of the new escalation method, designed around and with a single escalate tag used for three distinct and separate purposes, as already mentioned elseforum.

1. A frustrated user trying their best to help in solving their own problem but feels badly frustrated by our help, or more accurately lack of success, although continuing to thank all those kind enough to help.
   • Current thread no one other than J99 & OP has posted.
   • This short summary may be long !! but be aware I refer to a second thread the initial thread is a three page one with over 40 replies and nearly 400 views.
   • The 2nd thread was escalated on or before Monday 2nd Dec. :
     Two weeks ago, and remains escalated now.
   • Although threads have not had benefited from direct explicit HelpDesk involvement it has effectively received Tier 1 support, and the latest suggestions have not yet been tried out.
2. Problems with performance issues and hangs with High CPU/Ram usage
   • A high number of addons, >70 at one time possibly ca 30 at present
3. J99s personal opinion, possibly shared by others is that
   • It is likely to remain unsolvable due to so many addons and suggesting progress only likely if one of the following occurs
     • OP tests with a much reduced case, and the best method for doing that is to use multiple profiles enabling tests in a completely clean profile, and in profiles suitable to different work cases for day to day use.
       (I would also add probably also a 2nd clean and additional custom install of Firefox, Advanced methods not documented in Sumo KB but should allow an advanced user to test and continue day to day browsing with minimal disruption )
     • A bug is filed. That may be a favoured method of the help desk, but I suspect unsuitable for Bug filing at present. IMHO without a much reduced test case and STR Bug will fail at triage stage.
       AND note the OP is tending to use unsupported versions anyhow, but this is due to perceived or real problems with Releases. Multiple installs would at least demonstrate or help demonstrate if there is a regression. ( &/Or use mozregression an even more advanced concept and method)
     • Fresh ideas, HelpDesk or anyone.
     • IMPORTANT NOTE, very tellingly fresh installs in a clean profile work OK
4. DEVS & DEVS FORUM As a more general Topic, OP brought up a Devs thread. A thread about Devs attending to Fx25 Crashes one J99 had already tried and failed in posting to, apparently due to Devs understandably strict moderation policy. J99 wondering if
   • Devs may find some examples of Crashes and real problems from Sumo AAQ forum, and we may possibly benefit mutually from Sumo & Dev cooperation. Is this not something that HelpDesk is intended to assist with ?
   • Wishing to point out stats Crash has hard coded search that uses our Sumo chocolate teapot and so Devs or Triargers unlikely to obtain useful sumo info employing that method.

2nd Part, trying to address specific questions

Thanks for your continuing patience.

So official Mozilla staff havent seen this thread even? strange...

Sorry maybe not, it is all a new brand new System. It was rushed out before Christmas so as to get it out where it could benefit those posting questions before disruption with seasonal holidays. It did not help when a glitch escalated tens of thousands of questions !

For now ill see if its working normally for me on Fireofx23 first, if all goes well ill move up to 24, as i really dont like using an unmaintained old version of a browser its only a matter of time till i move to it anyways

I tend to favour a multi install multi profile approach. Bugs may be filed and actioned on any problems found in current or pre release versions. Your working profile and install is IMHO near on impossible to troubleshoot.

Btw, isnt the ESR of firefox only for companies and organizations that make agreements with firefox to get it? ive never seen it publicly available on the Firefox site...

It ESR is not intended for general public use. That includes running it permanently instead of an appropriate Release. My suggestions are personal ones going beyond this forum's ordinarily documented solutions and support. Other top-contributors and Moderators have suggested similar previously. There are discussions and precedents for this. We are effectively doing advanced troubleshooting and I am proposing ESR as more secure in real world testing in this instance. You are not going to get into trouble with Mozilla for doing this, or be asked to sign any agreement.

Hey
Never mind ESR. It is even controversial / undecided; how much support this forum and the associated KB offers for the pre-Releases Nightly, Aurora, & Beta.

Also, worth mentioning i suppose, today i did a clean install of Windows on another partition and thats what im using for now for firefox. I really want to reduce whatever chance of anything thats tampering worth Firefox to nothing (it had preinstalled windows from HP so maybe that could be it?)  

Great it all helps, that potentially isolates a lot of your plugins.

Lets not forget your bullet point in the first post of this thread

A portable install of Firefox runs just perfect, and even a fresh new profile without a single addon is perfect, its when i need addons the problems arise. 

With so many addons combinations run into millions and some could somehow interact with each other or somehow have some synergistic effect on Firefox & Memory /CPU usage, and that is before trying to account for real world usage on presumably myriads of different websites.

Hello StaxOnRax,

Thanks for the post and your patience. As John99 mentioned we've encountered some bumps in the escalation process.

I'd have to concur with John99's findings, if a fresh installation (new profiles and no addons) is working correctly it's going to be the interaction of the large amount of addons that is causing this issue.

Have you looked at reducing the amount of add-ons you have installed? For example it looks like you have 3 translating add-ons installed. Is there one that works better than the others or do all 3 of them offer a different set of features that you're using?

Cheers, Patrick

Patrick, thanks for finding the time to comment, John

Happy holidays all. Ive found some rather... interesting results from my experiment using Firefox 23 instead of 25 (or whatever the current version is currently)

Pretty much everything is back to the way i know it to be, right now firefox on idle currently stays at around 600 ~ 700MB of RAM and it doesnt use a ridiculously large amount of RAM anymore. Im using the very same addons i used to have before, and so far i havent had the insane RAM/CPU/Random Stuckness of before.

I took the test to test how far can it go even without making it have the old habit it had before and used the addons that i was recommended in the other thread not to use, and so far nothing has changed, its all normal. I even added yet more addons to try and see if i can make it have that behavior but in the few days of using it, nothing. Basically its back to normal (for now that is, due to a reboot i had to do the other day i couldn't keep firefox open for more than 2 days)

I can only try and guess whats caused this, my ideas are:

• -Something in firefox 25/possibly 24 changed and caused it to have this bug.

• -The version of the theme im using (FXChrome) is different than the one i had when i used firefox 25, i dont know how a theme could cause this but perhaps

• -Firefox itself was borked on my previous install but not the profiles of it (come to think of it i never really did reinstall firefox as a possible solution to the problem...) and thats why its working so well here

• -Having paused/uncompleted downloads in DownThemAll! addon. So far i dont have any paused or uncompleted downloads in DTA! as opposed to my prev firefox that did have paused ones...maybe?

• -In the Fun Characters addon having emojis added to its custom list. Currently i dont have any emojis (a kind of smiley) just normal complex ones.

Those are all the differences that i have compared to Firefox on my old install, and whatevever may be the cause among them then its a relief not to have the issue...altho upgradng to a more secure version would be nice, the risk of having those issues back is kind of a dealbreaker as id have an unusable browser at the end.

I didnt use Firefox at the time it was on version 17 so i have no idea if its better or not, previously i recall using firefox from version 4 to 14 and they all had rather high RAM usage (not like the one i had with 25, just the normal firefox one) in that time i sticked with opera until one day i used Firefox 21.

As for the portable firefox thing; tbh i havent used the portable or fresh Firefox for a long time to make it get the results i used to get with FF25, but a few days ago i was using Tor Browser for about 10 minutes or so and it was close to around 200MB, there were about 3 tabs in total and i visited my regular sites with it, so i guess with any version of Firefox its a matter of time till it hits a stable number ad idles on it? for example the first poster to my original post "gnitalla" said they too get Firefox going at around 600MB usually when left open for long times in a normal situation

In short, fr now things look good for me aside from the security risk i suppose, but im not done testing it yet to 100% say Firefox 23 is my savior. but from the looks of it it was a browser issue and not an addon issue i suppose?

@patrickmc, Ive gone that route quite alot if you read through the thread and the prev thread this is linked to, and as mentioned in my comment above it doesnt seem to be an addon thing as much as it is a possible browser issue.

As for the translation addons, i need all three of those so that they can give me something close to the built in translator of chrome, non of them can do it all but each one does something

StaxOnRax, I think Patrick is only intending the translator issue to be an example.

it doesnt seem to be an addon thing as much as it is a possible browser issue.

No you also confirm

A portable install of Firefox runs just perfect, and even a fresh new profile without a single addon is perfect, its when i need addons the problems arise. 

If you wish to test Firefox with a cleaninstall and clean profile and only a bare hanfull of addons you may find a problem addon or a pair that do not work together. Use multiple installs or multiple profiles if it helps you, but even reducing from >70 to ca40 addons is still not going to be easily testable or considered to be a browser issue in my opiion.

Can you not use different Firerox profiles with differet addons for different jobs ? There is no way you are going to be using all 40 addons all at once, or even in one session.

If you are able to show a clear and reprducible issue with current Firfox 26 compared with Firefox 23 developers will be interested, IF the fault is with Firefox 26 onwards.
(It is even better to test Firefox 29 that save you the effort of wasting time testing only to discover later that a fix is already made in the development version.)

• That is normally done by using a utility called mozregression, that will pin it down to the particuar build. Or more simply test with major versions and show which work and which do not.
• Before going anywhere you need a simple test on a current or development version of Firefox that breaks Firefox or causes it to misbehve badly. This is a requirement becasue developers only attempt to fix problems in supported versions.
• You need reproducible situations. That generaly means back to testing with one or two addons and proving memory & CPU does or does not skyrocket. Otherwise we are getting into the realms of endless variables and posibilities.
• Testing is easiest if you get clear and fast results in a defined situation e.g.
  • With a clean profile and fresh install of Firefox Version N
  • Only plugins & addons on top of that are X Y & Z (or none ! )
  • Browse normally for 1 day & maybe use email.
    Restrct use to sites A, B & C only.
  • Memory use rises from M1 to M2 as shown by about memory results files.
• Repeat with a different Firefox Version
• Note Mozregression will automate that testing to some extent, IF you have a suitable testcase or procedure.

As far as testing with Firefox 29 goes, which one?
The "regular" Nightly Firefox 29 has the new Australis interface and many add-ons may not be compatible. And becoming accustomed to the new interface isn't something to be doing while attempting to solve problems like this - IMHO.

The Holly-Nightly Firefox 29 might be something to consider as it doesn't have the new interface and other than changes made prior to Dec 10th when the last Release and version/stage progression occurred.

Overall, my "expert" opinion (as a Firefox user since Phoenix 0.4 in Sept 2002) is that StaxOnRax is using too many extensions, period. Plus there are too many similar extensions or similar sounding extensions installed, and that is just asking for problems.

My advice is to setup 3 separate Profiles to use, and use the -no-remote command line switch to launch all but the default Profile while another Profile is already running. (Assuming that Firefox is set as the default browser; if not, the -no-remote switch can be used with all Profiles, IMO.) Basically, launch the Default Browser / Profile first, and then as he needs features / extensions that are installed in the other Profiles launch another Profile and then close that Profile when those features/extensions aren't needed any longer.

Set up the Profiles as you see fit, but off the top of my head based upon the extensions John listed above on 12/1/13 2:52 PM I would say - a Profile for doing downloads, another for Translations, and a 3rd for general surfing. And have (say) 10 to 15 extensions that are common to all Profiles - the ones I call "must have" - like Adblock Plus, Greasemonkey, LastPass, Mozilla Archive Format, Session Manager, Stylish, and Troubleshooter, based upon the listing.