Limiting Forefox processes does ot work - loads of processes still running.
Firefox kept eating my RAM, running dozens of processes. I have gone into about:config and set the dom.ipc.processCount to 1 - then I restarted Firefox and found 5 processes running straightaway before even using the browser. I closed it down and have started it again and now there are 11 processes running with just one tab open. Firefox(9044) Utility(7552) JavaScript oracle Network (15912) Data Decoder (11364) GPU (18744) About pages (12536) Preloaded new tab Extensions (20544) Preallocated (16132) Preallocated (13780) Preallocated (16044)
The problem repeats on three different computers which are not infected with malware. One computer with slightly less RAM I now cant even use Firefox at all (though all other browsers work fine) because the tabs constantly crash due to the high number of processes. Is there any way to set the process limit low in a way that Firefox actually responds to?
All Replies (6)
Yes. That is expected behavior.
dom.ipc.processCount does not restrict firefox as a whole to 1 process, but the individual tabs/sites. Every tab/site is one process plus some auxiliary jobs by/for firefox itself.
You can tell from the oputput provided by you 3 threads/processes are Preallocated. You got Preloaded new tab, which i do not have, so probably an URL set for new tabs instead of blank page. And the Rest is the "inner workings" every firefox instance needs, before even loading a webpage.
Sorry to tell you, but you will not be able to reduce that any further.
Thanks that is helpful info, I guess I have to find an alternative to Firefox.
What are they playing at? It seems crazy that I can no longer use Firefox on a 2 year old Microsoft laptop that runs every other browser fine. Constant crashing due to RAM usage. I also have a brand new mini PC with 32 Gb RAM and when I run Firefox on that it slows down software I use such as Arcgis - presumably due to the number of Firefox processes running. This is a high performance, brand new mini PC and Firefox is causing it to run slowly! It's a pity I've used Firefox for decades with no issues and it has become unuseable in the space of 2 months across all my laptop/desktop devices.
This is not due to a number of processes and removing GPU process or Network process won't help you.
Can you provide 5 recent submitted crash IDs from the about:crashes page?
Thanks - the weird thing is it is telling me I have only crashed 3 times this year when I have actually crashed many dozens of times in the last month. I get the 'Gah! Tab crashed' error constantly, but this does not come up in about:crashes. The most recent crash ID is 3fb0dc9f-2e7c-4cb3-a8a5-15474600e9f7 and there is another from a few weeks previously e622c64e-ab73-43f9-b000-a3e82383fa84 - but it has crashed many more times than that.
So once again no resolution to this question. I guess nobody knows why this happens?
Not really, because we can't find any of these crash IDs on the server. Are you sure they are in the Submitted section?
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