To preface, I have had a thread about this previously,

https://kbin.social/m/firefox@lemmy.ml/t/840667/How-can-you-troubleshoot-a-crash-from-freezing

Ultimately, it didn’t result in much.

Cue a few months, a lot has happened, and I have a new PC. Different graphics card vendor, different RAM, different motherboard vendor. Almost everything is different.

The crashes stopped, in fact I didn’t notice them for a long time.

Past few days however, I noticed youtube videos starting to skip a bit. Thought it might just be youtube.

Then today happened. After about a month, I had a crash again. The PC has been left on for about a week (which is not really uncommon for me).

What I noticed that caught my eye…is that when i went to close it in task manager, it was using 14 GB. Just to be fair, I made sure before completing this post that I kicked every tab I had open out of inactive.

They are currently sitting at 5 GB.

What is occurring that is causing Firefox, under the same amount of active tabs (in fact possibly more, since I do have auto tab discard, so most of these tabs would not usually be active) to reach 3x the amount of ram they actually use?

I would like to get it to stop crashing, but it seems like even under a different hardware configuration, all I’ve done is make it take longer for it to actually happen, which makes me think even more that the it’s an issue with memory.

  •  ReversalHatchery   ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English
    12•11 months ago

    If that happens again, open about:processes in a new tab (type into URL bar), and sort by memory. Take a screenshot, redact private things, and if you upload it here, it would be easier to help. Chances are it’s a specific website that consumes that much RAM, or an addon

  •  muhyb   ( @muhyb@programming.dev ) 
    6•11 months ago

    My system is always on sleep when I turn my PC off and Firefox is always open. I close Firefox from system update to system update and it hasn’t crashed on me for quite a long time. Hopefully this doesn’t change.

    Inactive tabs shouldn’t cause a problem but you can use something like Simple Tab Groups to prevent them to stack too much, might help.

    Having a bigger swap partition also might help, if you have 16 GB RAM.

    Edit: Also just like others mentioned, try to run Firefox without any add-ons to see if that happens again. You can also do this in reverse, deactivating your add-ons one by one and use Firefox like that for a while, until the occurrence stops.

  •  viking   ( @viking@infosec.pub ) 
    5•11 months ago

    Can you share a list of the browser add-ons you’re using, and if possible/not confidential the tabs you have open? Or at least the number of tabs?

    Would make troubleshooting easier.

    Also, is it a plain Firefox or any fork?

    •  AnonTwo   ( @AnonTwo@kbin.social ) OP
      3•11 months ago

      ‘Improve Youtube!’
      600% sound volume
      7TV
      Auto Tab Discard
      Better TTV
      Libredirect
      LiveTL
      Privacy Badger
      Tampermonkey (No scripts enabled)
      Ublock
      User-Agent Switcher and Manager

      i’d say about 40 tabs, mix of:
      Danbooru
      Youtube
      Kbin
      Reddit
      Amazon
      game8.co
      libreddit

      Plain Firefox

  •  AnonTwo   ( @AnonTwo@kbin.social ) OP
    1•11 months ago

    Update: So far i’m down to 2 extensions:
    Ublock
    600% sound volume

    Memory still ballooned from 1GB to 5GB.

    When I checked processes before closing, even after force unloading Youtube under processes, GPU was using around 1 GB. There was literally nothing else I could unload that would stop this.

    Again I loaded all tabs just to be fair…GPU is using half of that currently. I’m also questioning the reliability of about:processes to an extent, because I couldn’t actually see what was adding up to the 5 GB I was seeing in task manager.

    I also tried some advice I saw to just whitelist youtube, as it sounds like google does something regarding adblockers. But this did not seem to do anything noticable.

    edit: based on another post, trying troubleshoot mode, though i’m always uncomfortable having all site blockers (ublock now) turned off.