Firefox Community Forum

My firefox is using up too much memory, up to 60% of my laptops memory, even when I am not using youtube. and I can't figure out what is causing it to use so much. I've used minimize memory to no effect, can you figure out what is causing it? This link has a memory report to help

Has anyone else noticed that the memory leak issues have gotten way worse since last update?

I work on a potato. Most of the memory is in the windows paging file, on a mechanical hard drive. So freeing up used memory takes longer than it would on a machine with a metric tonne of quad-channel RAM. The past 6 months, Firefox has started having memory leak issues, where it just uses more & more memory until the paging file hits its hard limit and windows kills firefox.

But since last update (135.0 x64), the memory leak issue has worsened significantly.

If I open firefox, and then tab between all current tabs, I get maybe 5 GB of memory usage. So even if all tabs are marked as "active" and loaded into memory, this still isn't enough to cause issues.

But after 30 minutes, that memory usage has ballooned up to >20 GB, at which point windows decides that it needs to free up memory, and kills the process. Which is annoying, because then the browser reverts to the last saved state, meaning many tabs can be lost or reset to several clicks back.

I've tried shaving off extensions, with zero change. I've tried increasing paging file size, but that's just kicking the bucket down the road.

Anyone have a solution to this?

I am on a Mac desktop running Ventura 13.7.3 and running Firefox 135 with extension of Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Google Don't Track Me, Facebook Container, FoxClocks and SoftGreenLeaves theme. All of these extensions have been playing nicely with each other for a long time.

Recently I've been having trouble recently with Firefox doing that thing of suddenly freezing/producing multiple windows and I need to refresh in order to get it working properly again. This has happened three times in the last five days - so frequently that I now keep the refresh instructions on my desktop. Today I heard the CPU grinding and clicked open my Activity Monitor to see four listings of 'FirefoxCP Isolated Web Content' running all of them using in excess of 2Gb. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a screenshot of the Activity Monitor while this was going on as I had the Mac force quite Firefox and the moment I did, the activity stopped, but I've attached an example of the Activity Monitor showing still high CPU values for a few moments of browsing.

So what's up? How can I stop the CPU grab? How can I stop the frequent crashing?

About once a minute or more Firefox lag by 10-15 seconds before showing a character or characters I have typed.

It seems to be using a lot RAM. I have one window open with six tabs, including this one, and it is using nearly 8GB. There are 48 processes showing in Activity monitor.

I am using version 135 on a Mac Book Pro running MacOS 15.3 (Sequoia).

It is almost unusable.

Even with all media tabs closed, GPU process keeps hogging memory. Tried with extensions disabled, but no effect. The main culprit is this GPU process. screenshot attached.

Unable to watch on YT ESL spirit v EF CS2 as memory usage constantly going up until pc almost locks up. Had this issue a few weeks back and it was the chat however now disabling chat makes no difference.

Nm tried disabling Ublock origin and it's fixed, left this there as it might be useful to you guys

I can only use firefox for 90 minutes at a time, before the entire system crashes.

Since the last couple of updates, the infamous memory leak issue has gotten significantly worse. Now 30 minutes of use with no add-ons sees the memory use swell to 13 GB, crashing the system. Sometimes windows 10 crashes, sometimes it just kills firefox.

The thing is, when I check about:memory, it says firefox is only using 1.5 GB. However task manager says 13 GB, and if I close the browser, suddenly 13 GB memory gets freed up.

Does anyone have any idea why there's such a discrepancy?

For a few months I have been having sporadic issues with my cpu running at 100%. I believe Firefox is the culprit. When I open task manager Firefox is running 30 processes with power usage very high. Usually one of the top processes in the drop down is very high. To fix this I have been ending the task of the highest usage process running. In all cases that has brought the cpu down to like 10% and has fixed the issue temporarily. If I'm not at my computer for some time, it will not resolve on it's own. I'm not sure what info you need but will provide. Could this be a bug with the current version of ESR?

I have tried the fixes including: Disable/Enable Hardware Acceleration, Enable Strict Tracking Protection, Delete content-prefs.sqlite file, Check Firefox hardware acceleration, Disable resource consuming extensions and themes, etc.

I am using Firefox ESR 128.6.0 and have been for years (ESR)

Computer: Dell Optiplex 9020 1 tb SSD hard drive Inel Core I7 4790 CPU 32GB RAM AMD Radeon R& 200 series GPU

this browser does nothing but eat and eat recourse. no matter what i do, no action ever stops it from hogging nearing 1/3rd of the resources of my machine all the damn time! And i dont want to hear virus or malware anything. i have swept, checked, and swept again. nothing is ever fucking found. And i do not trust the other browsers. so i guess i am just OFF THE INTERNET

For little more than year I've been battling with an issue, where after watching Youtube for hour or two, and having 5-6 open tabs with videos, at some point Firefox would crawl to a stop with UI going down to 1-2 fps, and finally inability to click anything, until I restarted the browser.

Only today I have pieced together, that when it happens, task manager shows almost all of my GPU's VRAM (Dedicated GPU memory) is claimed by Firefox. It looks that there is a GPU memory leak somewhere.

How should I go on about this? If it's a bug, what I should include in a report?

Here is ~2 hrs of progress, PC and Firefox specs at the end:

This is after watching one ~20 minute video:

====================

GPU (pid 10124) Explicit Allocations

0.24 MB (100.0%) -- explicit └──0.24 MB (100.0%) -- gfx/webrender/gpu-cache

  ├──0.24 MB (100.0%) ── metadata
  └──0.00 MB (00.00%) ── cpu-mirror

Other Measurements

0.78 MB (100.0%) -- gfx └──0.78 MB (100.0%) ── webrender/textures/gpu-cache

 265.84 MB ── gpu-committed

1,246.20 MB ── gpu-dedicated

  11.72 MB ── gpu-shared

End of GPU (pid 10124)

====================

After second video, another 15 minutes later:

====================

GPU (pid 10124) Explicit Allocations

0.29 MB (100.0%) -- explicit └──0.29 MB (100.0%) -- gfx/webrender/gpu-cache

  ├──0.29 MB (100.0%) ── metadata
  └──0.00 MB (00.00%) ── cpu-mirror

Other Measurements

0.63 MB (100.0%) -- gfx └──0.63 MB (100.0%) ── webrender/textures/gpu-cache

 277.34 MB ── gpu-committed

1,737.74 MB ── gpu-dedicated

  16.55 MB ── gpu-shared

End of GPU (pid 10124)

====================

After opening and CLOSING several youtube tabs, withplaying 10-15 seconds of each video:

====================

GPU (pid 10124) Explicit Allocations

0.19 MB (100.0%) -- explicit └──0.19 MB (100.0%) -- gfx/webrender/gpu-cache

  ├──0.19 MB (100.0%) ── metadata
  └──0.00 MB (00.00%) ── cpu-mirror

Other Measurements

0.78 MB (100.0%) -- gfx └──0.78 MB (100.0%) ── webrender/textures/gpu-cache

 390.18 MB ── gpu-committed

4,339.20 MB ── gpu-dedicated

   4.27 MB ── gpu-shared

End of GPU (pid 10124)

================================

Here, I closed all tabs except about:memory. After another ~60 minutes of random browsing non-video pages (literally text pages and Google Docs):

====================

GPU (pid 10124) Explicit Allocations

0.25 MB (100.0%) -- explicit └──0.25 MB (100.0%) -- gfx/webrender/gpu-cache

  ├──0.25 MB (100.0%) ── metadata
  └──0.00 MB (00.00%) ── cpu-mirror

Other Measurements

0.94 MB (100.0%) -- gfx └──0.94 MB (100.0%) ── webrender/textures/gpu-cache

 324.99 MB ── gpu-committed

4,396.21 MB ── gpu-dedicated

   0.62 MB ── gpu-shared

End of GPU (pid 10124)

====================

It never goes down.

Then, I opened played for few seconds, stopped and closed (including tabs) ~15 youtube videos:

================================

GPU (pid 10124) Explicit Allocations

52.08 MB (100.0%) -- explicit ├──23.07 MB (44.29%) -- gfx │ ├──23.07 MB (44.29%) -- webrender │ │ ├──10.00 MB (19.20%) ── upload-stagin-memory │ │ ├───6.74 MB (12.95%) ── texture-cache/structures │ │ ├───3.69 MB (07.08%) -- interning │ │ │ ├──1.48 MB (02.84%) -- clip │ │ │ │ ├──0.78 MB (01.50%) ── interners │ │ │ │ └──0.70 MB (01.34%) ── data-stores │ │ │ ├──1.24 MB (02.39%) -- text_run │ │ │ │ ├──0.92 MB (01.77%) ── interners │ │ │ │ └──0.32 MB (00.62%) ── data-stores │ │ │ └──0.96 MB (01.85%) ++ (15 tiny) │ │ ├───0.95 MB (01.83%) ++ (6 tiny) │ │ ├───0.89 MB (01.71%) ── shader-cache │ │ └───0.79 MB (01.52%) -- resource-cache │ │ ├──0.79 MB (01.52%) ── fonts │ │ └──0.00 MB (00.00%) ++ (3 tiny) │ └───0.00 MB (00.00%) ++ (3 tiny) ├──19.94 MB (38.30%) ── heap-unclassified ├───4.00 MB (07.68%) ── ac2d/heap-resources ├───3.25 MB (06.25%) -- threads │ ├──2.29 MB (04.40%) ++ stacks │ └──0.96 MB (01.85%) -- overhead │ ├──0.91 MB (01.76%) ── kernel │ └──0.05 MB (00.09%) ++ (2 tiny) ├───1.35 MB (02.59%) -- phc │ ├──1.35 MB (02.59%) ── metadata │ └──0.00 MB (00.00%) ── fragmentation └───0.46 MB (00.89%) ++ (9 tiny)

Other Measurements

134,217,727.94 MB (100.0%) -- address-space ├──132,114,625.34 MB (98.43%) ── free(segments=370) ├────2,101,793.05 MB (01.57%) -- reserved │ ├──2,097,077.34 MB (01.56%) ── mapped(segments=14) │ └──────4,715.70 MB (00.00%) ── private(segments=550) └────────1,309.55 MB (00.00%) ++ commit

72.73 MB (100.0%) -- decommitted └──72.73 MB (100.0%) -- heap

  ├──61.39 MB (84.41%) ── decommitted
  └──11.34 MB (15.59%) -- unused-pages
     ├──11.34 MB (15.59%) ── fresh
     └───0.00 MB (00.00%) ── madvised

304.62 MB (100.0%) -- gfx └──304.62 MB (100.0%) -- webrender

  ├──302.79 MB (99.40%) -- textures
  │  ├──192.00 MB (63.03%) ── render-targets
  │  ├───44.00 MB (14.44%) -- texture-cache
  │  │   ├──44.00 MB (14.44%) ── atlas
  │  │   └───0.00 MB (00.00%) ── standalone
  │  ├───32.00 MB (10.51%) ── depth-targets
  │  ├───18.93 MB (06.21%) ── swap-chains
  │  ├───11.25 MB (03.69%) ── upload-staging-textures
  │  └────4.61 MB (01.51%) ++ (5 tiny)
  └────1.83 MB (00.60%) ++ images/mapped_from_owner

128.00 MB (100.0%) -- heap ├───72.73 MB (56.82%) -- decommitted │ ├──61.39 MB (47.96%) ── unmapped │ └──11.34 MB (08.86%) -- unused-pages │ ├──11.34 MB (08.86%) ── fresh │ └───0.00 MB (00.00%) ── madvised └───55.27 MB (43.18%) -- committed

   ├──48.27 MB (37.71%) ── allocated
   ├───3.95 MB (03.09%) -- bin-unused
   │   ├──2.35 MB (01.84%) ++ (44 tiny)
   │   └──1.60 MB (01.25%) ── bin-1024
   ├───1.96 MB (01.53%) ── bookkeeping
   └───1.09 MB (00.85%) ── unused-pages/dirty

41 (100.0%) -- ipc-channels ├───7 (17.07%) ── PCompositorManagerParent ├───7 (17.07%) ── PImageBridgeParent ├───7 (17.07%) ── PVRManagerParent ├───6 (14.63%) ── PRemoteDecoderManagerParent ├───5 (12.20%) ── PAPZInputBridgeParent ├───4 (09.76%) ── PCanvasManagerParent ├───2 (04.88%) ── PVideoBridgeParent ├───1 (02.44%) ── PGPUParent ├───1 (02.44%) ── PProfilerChild └───1 (02.44%) ── PVsyncBridgeParent

78 (100.0%) -- ipc-channels-peak ├──14 (17.95%) ── PCompositorManagerParent ├──14 (17.95%) ── PImageBridgeParent ├──14 (17.95%) ── PVRManagerParent ├──13 (16.67%) ── PRemoteDecoderManagerParent ├──10 (12.82%) ── PCanvasManagerParent ├───8 (10.26%) ── PAPZInputBridgeParent ├───2 (02.56%) ── PVideoBridgeParent ├───1 (01.28%) ── PGPUParent ├───1 (01.28%) ── PProfilerChild └───1 (01.28%) ── PVsyncBridgeParent

25 (100.0%) -- observer-service └──25 (100.0%) -- referent

  ├──22 (88.00%) ── strong
  └───3 (12.00%) -- weak
      ├──3 (12.00%) ── alive
      └──0 (00.00%) ── dead

1 (100.0%) -- preference-service └──1 (100.0%) -- referent

  ├──1 (100.0%) ── strong
  └──0 (00.00%) ++ weak

               1 ── ac2d-context-count
               0 ── ac2d-target-count
         4.00 MB ── ac2d-texture-memory
         0.00 MB ── gfx-d2d-vram-draw-target
         0.00 MB ── gfx-d2d-vram-source-surface
       462.87 MB ── gpu-committed
     6,829.63 MB ── gpu-dedicated
         0.62 MB ── gpu-shared
        48.27 MB ── heap-allocated
         1.00 MB ── heap-chunksize
       686.68 MB ── private
       558.20 MB ── resident
       481.14 MB ── resident-unique
        44.44 MB ── system-heap-allocated
 2,103,102.59 MB ── vsize

129,414,503.44 MB ── vsize-max-contiguous

               0 ── webgl-buffer-count
         0.00 MB ── webgl-buffer-memory
               0 ── webgl-context-count
               0 ── webgl-renderbuffer-count
         0.00 MB ── webgl-renderbuffer-memory
               0 ── webgl-shader-count
               0 ── webgl-texture-count
         0.00 MB ── webgl-texture-memory

End of GPU (pid 10124)

====================

This just continues, when gpu-dedicated hits ~7.8 GB, Firefox becomes unusable, and rest of the system appears a bit sluggish.

I can't say if this is regression, since I haven't been watching YT at all until recently.

Windows 10 Pro 22H2 Firefox Nightly 64 bit EN, 139.0a1 build 20250405211119 Checked in my normal everyday profile and with new clean one. GPU acceleration enabled, all video codecs installed.

Hardware: Core i7 9750H, 32 GB DDR4, GeForce 4060 8 GB. this is NOT a RAM issue, RAM usage never goes above ~19 GB on this PC.

It happens a tad bit slower than before, when I had 1060 6 GB.

I also noticed it on my laptop with integrated Intel GPU, but I don't have it anymore, so can't really check.

Since around the time I updated to Windows 11 version 24H2 (which I severely regret doing, but it's too late to revert), my computer runs very slowly for several seconds whenever Firefox is launched or whenever its window is restored from minimized. It also randomly slows down the computer every minute or two for several seconds. The slow down manifests as a very long lag in cursor movements and typing.

The impact is most severe when I am running other programs at the same time, including Outlook and a rather old version of Quicken, but it can be seen even when there are no other programs running.

This happens even in Firefox troubleshoot mode. This happens even after a refresh. I tried deleting my entire Firefox profile. I tried uninstalling Firefox and reinstalling it. I tried reinstalling the two previous versions of Firefox. I tried with hardware acceleration off and on. I tried changing every possible video setting I could find. My video drivers are fully up-to-date, as are my Windows updates and my BIOS. Nothing has helped. The same problem even exists with a brand-new installation of Firefox and a brand-new profile!

Notably, I don't see this issue with either Chrome or Edge. And I don't see it when many other programs are running at the same time without FF, even RAM-hungry and CPU-intensive programs like image and video editing programs. This is specifically a FF issue.

Before updating to Win 11 ver 24H2, FF was running on this computer for years without issues. I can't say the problem started exactly when I installed 24H2, but it seems like it was around then. I have another computer still on 23H2 with the same version of Firefox (and the same versions of Outlook and Quicken) that does not have this issue.

My computer is essentially unusable when Firefox and any other major program are running at the same time. I've tried seeing if the CPU or RAM usage spikes during the slowdown, but since the computer nearly (but not quite) freezes when it happens, I haven't been able to catch it live.

Thank you to anyone who might be able to help. I've had to move to Chrome because of this, and I'm not happy about that.

Hi, I use Firefox all the time, love it. But I have noticed a problem.

If I have say 7 tabs open, none of them doing anything, then go away from my laptop for say 20 minutes, when I come back the fans on the laptop are screaming. Even if it was minimise.

I have a fairly modern laptop Dell GSeries1522, 12th gen processor, 16gb ram, i7.

I have tested this issue using Edge and Chrome with exactly the same tabs open and the laptop is all quiet. I'm on the precipice of moving to Edge. Happy to provide more information. Task Manager now shows FF using 1223.0mb of memory, Edge 466.7mb. They are both in "efficiency mode".

Any help or advice would be great.

Peter Hall Brisbane, Australia.

I use Firefox 134.0.2 (aarch64) as my primary web browser. I only have it open 15 minutes and I am receiving alerts that my RAM memory is being consumed by it. I am using a Mac Mini Pro M2 chip with 32GB of RAM . I have just opened Firefox to discover it is taking 10GB of that RAM. It is the most voracious user. If I have it open longer it gets up to 16GB of memory. I often have 5 or 6 tabs open when I am working. My other browser is Chrome that barely makes it to 1GB

Доброе время суток!

это папка C:\Users\Илья\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\v2zudvil.default-release\storage\to-be-removed постоянно растет, удалять ее приходится вручную, почему так происходит? и как это избежать 

последний раз, когда удалял, это папка занимала 52ГБ

Firefox is running too many processes in the background. You have eliminated access to the user settings to be able to reduce that number. It is using so much memory (two tabs, one window, 1400 MB) it is becoming a nuisance rather than an asset. How do I reduce the number of processes. Thanks

Firefox prompted me that my local storage space was insufficient. When I opened the data management page, I found that a particular website's local storage was abnormally large, and some websites were inaccessible or unable to log in. After restarting Firefox, the issue did not reoccur.

I'm tired of trying to find a solution to this problem, you're deaf!

I have been using Firefox since 2003. to avoid writing unnecessary words, I will simply state, I will leave firefox if you do not eliminate this problem:

firefox eats up all the RAM on my Mac. It is none of your business whether I open 1 tab or 10 tabs, give me the ability to limit the memory used by firefox, otherwise it eats up all the computer's memory.