Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Firefox using too much memory despite set to 1 process.

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
  • 13 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

So a while ago, or better years ago, Firefox and other browsers for some reason changed to a lot of processes instead of a single one. I never really cared about it, but now I want to know. Why is the browser using so much memory? I can't understand how a single tab of, let's say, Youtube on low-quality, generally 360p, is using more than 2 GB of my Systems RAM. I looked up a setting that changes the browser to 1 process, and it helps if I do not have a lot of tabs open. But enabling the setting does nothing. I still have around 6 to 8 processes in my task manager and their total memory usage simply doesn't justify it. If I play a more or less a few-years-old game, I get less memory usage from it than from one tab with a video on it. Heck, actual movies in my video player take much less memory. Can someone explain to me how this is happening and how I can circumvent the 6-8 processes, which pop-up despite me changing it to 1 process in the settings? Excuse my German screenshot, but it should be understandable that I set it to 1 content process. Also it shows how my browser uses 1 entire Gigabyte of RAM just for this website. Why and how?

So a while ago, or better years ago, Firefox and other browsers for some reason changed to a lot of processes instead of a single one. I never really cared about it, but now I want to know. Why is the browser using so much memory? I can't understand how a single tab of, let's say, Youtube on low-quality, generally 360p, is using more than 2 GB of my Systems RAM. I looked up a setting that changes the browser to 1 process, and it helps if I do not have a lot of tabs open. But enabling the setting does nothing. I still have around 6 to 8 processes in my task manager and their total memory usage simply doesn't justify it. If I play a more or less a few-years-old game, I get less memory usage from it than from one tab with a video on it. Heck, actual movies in my video player take much less memory. Can someone explain to me how this is happening and how I can circumvent the 6-8 processes, which pop-up despite me changing it to 1 process in the settings? Excuse my German screenshot, but it should be understandable that I set it to 1 content process. Also it shows how my browser uses 1 entire Gigabyte of RAM just for this website. Why and how?
Attached screenshots

All Replies (1)

more options