memory
Okay -- here's the add-on information generated by the troubleshooter link you asked me to install.
If you want several overly large (above threshold) Windows Task Manager debug files from episodes in the past couple of weeks when the FF memory load was really high (~800Mb+) and the browser was quite non-responsive, let me know where you'd like them uploaded.
Thanks for whatever insight this information might provide.
All Replies (5)
It sounds as though this is not an "every day" problem. Have you noticed any relationship between the sites you visit, and/or the type of media they use, and times when memory usage is unusually high?
After Firefox became sluggish, were you able to revive it by closing tabs or did you have to terminate it before it worked properly again?
If Firefox crashed, there should be a link on the "about:crashes" page that you can share with volunteers here. This article describes that option in more detail: Troubleshoot Firefox crashes (closing or quitting unexpectedly).
You do have some addons, does firefox work correctly in safe mode (not as much memory usage)?
I generally don't use FF in safe mode. When it became non-responsive. my approach was to close tabs, repeatedly clear the memory load with CleanMem and keep Task Manager open to monitor whether anything else was overloading the RAM. Although I never got a Windows system message of "(Not Reponding)" on the app window's top bar, there was nothing else I could do to recover its function but to terminate the process (process tree is what I usually select in such instances), after which I rebooted the laptop and then everything would work fine again for awhile.
I originally thought there was an interaction with an Intellicast animated radar webpage that was the contributing element as I stated in the bug report I submitted (#893943), since I was monitoring it consistently during a week of stormy weather (very unusual for Central Texas during mid-Summer). However, after that weather system finally moved away and I stopped launching or keeping that webpage open when conditions normalized into more typical late-July hot & dry, the non-responsive behavior has still occasionally occurred. On a couple of occasions when it happened I would look at the FF memory load in Task Manager and discover it was extremely high -- on two of those occasions I used the debug option to make a memory dump, but the files are too large and exceed the system maximum threshold to upload as additions to the bug report. After failing in those upload attempts, I started searching the Mozilla support website for memory loading issues and so made the post in the other thread as it seemed to have the symptoms whose characteristics fit most closely.
It seems that Ghostery might be a significant contributing factor to the memory-hogging issue, particularly the v5.0.1 update. Over the past couple of days since upgrading to FF v23.0 I've experienced a number of outright crashes, all of which have uploaded bug self-reports to Mozilla afterwards. There were a couple of comments on a parallel thread this morning which targeted Ghostery, so I checked their support website directly and found they were acknowledging a memory-leak issue with v5.0.1 and were testing a beta fix, which has now become final and is available through the Mozilla add-ons site.
If you have been experiencing issues with FF and have the Ghostery add-on installed, update it to the final v5.0.2 -- it seems to produce a more stable and less memory-hogging operation so far.
Here is a link to the other FF support thread on this issue:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/958108?page=4#answer-468537
Here is a link to the Ghostery support thread:
Did you notice a comment about animations in another thread you were posting in /questions/958108?page=5#answer-469592