Re: [gentoo-user] Memory/CPU usage in recent versions of Firefox

[R0b0t1]

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 8:10 AM, Grant Edwards
<grant.b.edwards@×××××.com> wrote:
> Starting a few months back, I've noticed that on some of my machines,
> Firefox has started to use rediculous amounts of CPU and memory. It
> will burn 100% of a CPU for minutes at a time while apparently doing
> nothing.  Opening 2-3 tabs will use up 1-2 GB of RAM.  Doing the same
> thing thing in Chrome uses 0% CPU (once pages are rendered) and less
> that 1/10 the RAM.
>

You should pay attention to which web pages you are visiting because
this is almost always due to misbehaving JavaScript. You can use
`htop` to display custom thread names and Firefox will name the
threads so that you can tell which ones are running the JavaScript
engine.

I'm using 500MB or so with a few pages open. 1-2GB seems normal. Be
sure that the resource usage statistics mean what you think they mean.

I did recently have an issue where a Firefox instance on Windows that
had been running for a month or so started to become unresponsive, but
restarting it fixed it.

> I've got the same version of Firefox with the same set of extensions
> on other machines that don't seem to have issues.
>
> Is there any useful troubleshooting one can do (e.g. uninstalling
> extensions one at a time)?  Or is it finally time to give up on
> Firefox?
>

You can "refresh firefox"
(https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings)
which removes your profile, its addons, and all associated settings.
This is faster than reinstalling it and from what I can tell
accomplishes the same thing.

For the longest time Firefox was far better than Chromium at resource
usage simply due to how Chromium is structured. Since that can't
really change I am wary to say Firefox is worse in that regard. If
anything has happened it seems like there is a new bug or a regression
that you could report.

R0b0t1.