Since the FF43 update I can no longer open more than a few tabs; after that I just get a blank screen.
Firefox 43.0.1 is practically unusable, so I have been forced to migrate to Chrome.
FF43 seems to have finally gotten the memory usage problem under control, but with the price that Firefox is now unable to open more than 2 or 3 tabs before becoming unable to open any more. This happens when restoring a previous set of tabs. The first few tabs viewed open without any problems, but when I click over to the third or fourth one I start to see blank screens. After that nothing happens.
(I am using WinXP SP3. I am not using "Nvidia Forceware Network Access Manager." The past 20 versions of FF have all had memory overflow issues when many tabs were open, but they all remained usable. This version 43 is the first one which is basically unusable.)
Isisombululo esikhethiwe
Conclusion: I tried downgrading to FF42 and FF41. I was able to retain all my settings. However, this did not resolve the problem. This clarified that while the problem may have somehow been triggered by the upgrade to FF43, it was likely NOT a problem with the FF43 software itself.
After that I set up a new profile as suggested by cor-el, and moved over the files mentioned here plus the sessionstore.js file. After starting up the new profile with the transferred profile data (but without the extensions), the failure to load problem disappeared. Running FF43 build 4 I was able to open 35 tabs without a problem. As a bonus, memory management does seem to be somewhat improved.
Funda le mpendulo ngokuhambisana nalesi sihloko 👍 0All Replies (5)
Yes, I'm sure...
How much physical memory do you have on your computer and how much does Firefox use? Also make sure that the page file is large enough.
Windows XP isn't very good in general with managing memory and can easily run out of GDI resources, so try to close down unneeded applications.
Did you try a new profile folder?
Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problem.
See "Creating a profile":
- https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Standard_diagnostic_-_Firefox#Profile_issues
If the new profile works then you can transfer files from a previously used profile to the new profile, but be cautious not to copy corrupted files to avoid carrying over problems.
Boot the computer in Windows Safe Mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) to see if that helps.
The computer has 4G of RAM. The paging file is another 3G adjustable. Total RAM usage rarely goes over 3G. As described earlier in this thread, starting with version 43 Firefox no longer uses more than ~500MB of RAM. It typically stops loading webpages once I open up enough tabs to reach approximately 450MB in memory usage. Prior to version 43 it often went up to 1GB or even higher, though at memory levels exceeding 1GB (caused by having too many tabs open) it would tend to freeze up.
On a side note: Firefox has been rather XP-unfriendly for over a year, but was still usable.
Starting up a new profile without all of my plugins and history would kind of defeat the purpose of returning Firefox to a usable state. If you suspect that the underlying cause of this problem is something other than FF43, perhaps the easiest test to check for this possibility would be to simply downgrade to FF42? If I simply re-install v42 and overwrite v44 beta7, will it keep my profile, settings, history and plug-ins?
Okulungisiwe ngu XPSP3
Long silence. I'm starting to wonder if this thread is now dead...
Isisombululo Esikhethiwe
Conclusion: I tried downgrading to FF42 and FF41. I was able to retain all my settings. However, this did not resolve the problem. This clarified that while the problem may have somehow been triggered by the upgrade to FF43, it was likely NOT a problem with the FF43 software itself.
After that I set up a new profile as suggested by cor-el, and moved over the files mentioned here plus the sessionstore.js file. After starting up the new profile with the transferred profile data (but without the extensions), the failure to load problem disappeared. Running FF43 build 4 I was able to open 35 tabs without a problem. As a bonus, memory management does seem to be somewhat improved.
Okulungisiwe ngu XPSP3