Does Firefox have a memory Leak? Crashes after being open for too long.

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.

AnonTwo, (edited )

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.

boredsquirrel,

Instead of asking here, please open a bug report

AnonTwo,

I don't know how to do that.

boredsquirrel,

bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi

Create an account, select Firefox, and enter all the required info. In Firefox under “about firefox” you can get the version info.

AnonTwo,

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1894286

muhyb, (edited )

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.

gomp,

No idea what’s actually happening, but it might also be one of the pages/sites using more and more resources wothout proper cleanup.

Anticorp,

Reddit does this. Ever since they released their latest design they don’t actually unload anything you’ve already viewed and pretty soon afterwards the site completely breaks.

downpunxx,

It's definitely Firefox, moved over from Chrome about 9 months ago, YouTube constantly stuttering to the point of unusability, other sites like Tumblr and Mastodon, also constantly though intermittently seizing, locking up both their individual tabs, and sometimes the entire application in toto. Closing doesn't help as much as rebooting. Added "Auto Tab Discard" which reduces Firefox memory usage, and seems to have sped up my Firefox usage quite a bit, so might be worth checking out.

ReversalHatchery,

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

viking,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

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,

'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

batcheck,

Probably not your problem unless you use Twitch constantly. But for me 7tv and BetterTV crashed Firefox all the time. Any streamer with 5k+ active chatters destroyed my browsing session with those two. I decided to remove them and rely on chatterino

RvTV95XBeo,

Yeah, that many (dare I say sketchy) plugins, I’d decisively recommend seeing if you can reproduce the issue without them

GroteStreet,

To start Firefox without any plugins loaded, go from


<span style="color:#323232;">Menu > Help > Troubleshoot Mode...
</span>
cmnybo,

I’ve never seen Firefox use that much memory, even with lots of tabs open for weeks. Maybe you have an extension that’s causing issues.

wahming,

Are you using any uncommon plugins? Might be a plugin issue. My firefox gets left on for weeks with no issues.

AnonTwo,

'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

wahming, (edited )

Possibly one of them or another. You could try disabling a few at a time till you isolate the culprit (or eliminate them all as suspects).

AnonTwo,

Possibly? The issue is it takes upwards a week for the memory issues to reach the point of becoming noticable....

wahming,

Just remembered, FF has the built in memory manager, did you ever check the usage in there?

AnonTwo,

I did find that, is there a way to just leave it on and keep tracking? it seems like the reports only run at the time you decide to check them.

It'd be nice if there was a way for it to be on at the time of the crash. I found out in my previous attempts that the crash report does not actually seem to generate for this crash.

wahming,

You don’t need to wait till it crashes. Check the memory usage daily, see if the usage of anything is ballooning. If it takes a week to leak enough to eat all your RAM you’ll see it happening in plenty of time.

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