Firefox eating all RAM on Ubuntu24.04

[Carsten Agger]

Hi people


On 8/13/24 20:56, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 8:33 AM Carsten Agger <agger at modspil.dk> wrote:
>> Recently I've noticed, that certain rather JavaScript-heavy web pages -
>> especially RocketChat, Gitlab and Whereby.com video chat - seem to make
>> Firefox use gargantuan amounts of RAM, ending up exhausting the swap
>> space (I have 16GB of RAM and 1GB of swap space - too little swap, but
>> with 16G's of RAM that shouldn't be a problem).
>>
>> I'm using Firefox 129 (Canonical snap edition) on Ubuntu 24.04. I'm not
>> seeing the same problem when viewing the same web pages in Chromium.
>>
>> Does anyone have similar experiences or (in the best of cases) know of a
>> workaround?
> Take a look at Firefox uses too much memory or CPU resources,
> <https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-or-cpu-resources>.
>
Thanks for all of your responses!

It's been very helpful, and there's been far too much response for me to 
thank you all individually.

For the time being, I've remedied the situation in two ways:

1) increasing swap space from 1GB to 16GB - following an old rule of 
thumb that swap space should equal physical RAM. This should prevent the 
system grinding to a halt

2) using Chromium rather than Firefox for JS-heavy internal sites such 
as Gitlab, RocketChat and video communication.


Chromium is not really satisfactory, as Google seems to want to phase 
out its support for ad blockers, and I refuse to use the Internet at 
large without an ad blocker.

But I'll definitely need to check out the huge selection of browsers 
mentioned by Ralf. My only requirement is that they should be free 
software, which most are, I believe.

But thanks again, my problem seems to be solved for now. :-)

Carsten


>
-- 
Carsten Agger - agger at fsfe.org
     https://fsfe.org --- https://blogs.fsfe.org/agger/
FSFE Denmark Coordinator, General Assembly & European Team Member
Free Software, Free Society!