Is there any particular sites that cause the ram usage to go up so high? The only one I've heard causing it recently is Facebook after they redesigned their site to the new version.

I wouldn't expect you to need more than 8GB of ram but am curious about your tab & window usage. Not saying you do this but there have been people who have 100s of tabs open in multiple windows and then report having very high ram usage. I just want to rule that out in your situation & see if we can establish which sites cause it. Only then can we report the high memory using sites to the developers so they can investigate & see if we can counter what causes it.

Yeah, the more info provided can help us help you. I would love to see the amount of ram used after just logging into Windows and the number of processes running. What are the specs of the computer?

Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20201205 KDE Plasma Version: 5.20.4 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.76.0 Qt Version: 5.15.2 Kernel Version: 5.9.12-1-default OS Type: 64-bit Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-4810MQ CPU @ 2.80GHz Memory: 31.0 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: Mesa DRI Intel® HD Graphics 4600

I logged into my Win10 laptop and have just over 5gigs of ram already used up with 73 Background processes and 3 apps.

Hi, Thanks for your answer jonzn4SUSE To be perfectly honest – I’m honest - I came back to tell that I changed my mind this morning. I decided to upgrade the amount of the RAM on my desktop PC. It’s eventually easy and not so expensive. I explain : The fact is that, when I assembled my Desktop PC, and had to choose each component, I bought a good motherboard, but may be a little overpowered for my use, which allows to upgrade the speed of the RAM from 2133 to 2400 GHZ. But I actually chose to not use that possibility. It’s interesting for players. I’m not PC player. I didn’t use either the possibility of overclock for an AMD processor. I chose instead an Intel one. So, in the end I can take any good inexpensive RAM for the upgrade. I did a mistake buying that “extra RAM”, more expensive, 3 years ago, which can be nice for players. (The speed of both the processor and the RAM can be overclocked) I have done a test of that overclocking of the RAM speed this morning and I didn’t notice any difference! So, no need to upgrade with the same kind of “extra” and expensive RAM.

This morning I purchased 2x4 Go of “normal” DDR4 2400 GHz RAM (Crucial) for 27€. Not a big deal. I guess that the point of upgrading the amount of RAM must be a classic problem, after some time. Everything becoming bigger, the data (videos for ex) and the apps. Some people won’t be able to upgrade their PC RAM from 8 to 16 Go. They’ll have to do some other choices. I can do it and it’s the easiest solution for me right now.

I forgot to tell you that yes I like to open a lot of tabs in the browser, yes I do ! Not one hundred! far from that. But this morning I ended with the same problem using "Brave", and not Firefox. That made me think, and I ended with the conclusions that you read beyond. Have a nice evening.

Pascal (Paris, France)

Yeah, the more ram the merrier!  ;-))

But not necessarily, it depends on the use of each one. I personally can put until 64 GB of RAM on my motherboard. But what for? And it's quite expensive. So, voila.

Thanks Pascal for letting us know you experienced the same problem on Brave as well!

I have to say I agree with you on why should we need such huge amounts of RAM & faster processing speeds just to simply browse the web? But as you said, the ever increasing size of videos, other data types & the complexity of what the websites do keeps making what we do have a bit inferior. Even though it shouldn't. And the worst part of all, is that as we get better specs on our desktops & laptops the prices of them don't come down quickly at all. That's why I'm still stuck on a Intel i3 processor as I've been waiting ~10 yrs for the price of a Intel i7 desktop to come down below $500. But I guess that's never happening :P

Of course it depends on the use and no one is telling you to put in 64, but you clearly don't have enough which is why you are here.

You can check the Firefox Task Manager (about:performance) and about:memory pages.

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/task-manager-tabs-or-extensions-are-slowing-firefox
• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-or-cpu-resources

Hi, There is something you should pay attention to: Do you put your PC to sleep for several days in a row, or do you put Windows off ? Sleep mode can become a habit if your computer is a desktop. That can create memory occupancy problems, and I think I have been the victim of that without realizing it, because I have been surprised to see that my browsers, both Firefox and Brave, are less greedy now. The devil is in the details dear fellows :)

[ LAST MINUTE : After one hour I can see that the size used by my browsers are again seriously increasing. No connection with the topic, then,  I mentioned above

but maybe linked with the fact that I listen to live stream radios for ex. ]

Firefox has been my preferred browser since Mosaic and Netscape days, but its RAM-hogging behavior in the last two years has become such a nuisance that I am actively considering moving to IE, the only big-dog browser other than Firefox that has a menu bar.

I have a stock Dell desktop with 12 GB RAM, running Windows 10 Pro. Here's a screen shot of Task Manager showing the most recent updates of Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Internet Explorer. The browsers are loaded to exactly the same page with text and static graphics.

If you can't see the image below, it shows

Firefox at about 473 MB Chrome at 123 MB Edge at 93 MB IE at 45 MB

IMHO, this stark difference should be a front-burner development project. The idea that Firefox needs more than 10 times the RAM to merely boot to a simple page when compared with IE cannot be defended.

If I have lots of tabs open in Firefoxe, e.g., 50, it can exceed 8 GB of RAM! Chrome with a similar number of tabs open *might* climb up to a 1 GB of RAM

have to agree with these people. I have win 7 running Firefox and it has no problems at all. here I bought a comp a year ago running win 10 and immediately upgraded the ram,thought that would take care of it. I have no other apps running specifically because Firefox maxs out my cpu on a regular basis. this happens every 60 days and I have to refresh Firefox over and over. Not on my old pc, not at all. I wasn't put on this earth to have to figure out and fix what goes wrong over and over again. hunting for answers that people claim were taken care of yet I find I have a special circumstance or whatever. I won't go into details because of all the stock answers I get and I'm tired of it. This may be the last time I refresh Firefox.

Deleting the history for the month of January caused FireFox to double its memory from 2gb to 4gb several times during the 15 minutes it took to do the delete and the disk was 100% busy the whole time. FireFox has fallen for the idea that it must get everything done as fast as possible. HOG HOG. There are lots of other things I would rather do during that 15 minutes, including using Firefox as a browser or using aa different app. For all its hurry to get things done, I haven't seen any increase in browsing speed over the last 20 years!!!

Hi Bob, May I ask you, by curiosity, how old are the hard disk and the whole computer? What is the speed of the processor, and the total amount of the RAM you have now? And also : When was Windows installed on your PC? 3, 5 ,7 years ago, or more? It matters a lot. A lot of details matter with computers. It's may be not the fault of Firefox. A very old disks can be "the weak link". or sometimes a system which requtres to be reinstalled after years. The strength of a chain is the strength of the weakest link, it's the same with computers. Which system runs that PC ? which version of Windows?

Pascal