Does anyone have this issue were firefox becomes slow if left open for a long time. In my case after a couple of weeks rendering becomes slow and when I use youtube for example if is laggy, just trying to change volume taka few second to show the volume bar. It also happens to my laptop at work. I have around 30 tabs open.
Try using a tab suspend extension, something like ‘auto tab discard’. Firefox has one built-in, but it’s not aggressive enough.
Close everything and start fresh
Your productivity shouldn’t rely on keeping one piece of software running for long periods of time.
Yes it happens. As others have said: just restart.
What might not be as clear: when you restart, if it doesn’t just come up and offer to restore your session, you can go to History and Restore Previous Session. This reopens all your tabs (actually, they won’t fully reload until you view them).
Or just use bookmarks like a normal person
Bookmarks are for really important stuff. Open tabs are for stuff I want to be able to easily stumble back upon, but I won’t be butthurt if I dont.
There’s nothing wrong with having more than one way to categorize stuff.
Edit: and considering that session data is also written to disk, there really isn’t much difference between bookmarks and open tabs anyway.
Most software in general has hard to detect issues after several weeks of uptime. Its something that’s fundamentally hard to test and fix. Its a big reason why “did you turn it off and on again” is such universal advice.
Why would you need your browser, let alone your PC on for weeks without any break
My laptop with a non-critical service: Uptime: 9 weeks, 5 hours, 34 minutes
I’ve had Debian VMs run for long periods of time without me touching them. They normally would have high uptime unless it automatically reboots to apply a kernel update. The key is these are virtualized servers. You should absolutely avoid running to long without a reboot. The longer you wait the greater the chance of something breaking on the next boot. There is also the issue of memory fragmentation but that’s not really an issue these days.
Lol, cause we’re all lazy gits.
Cobbler’s kids have the worst shoes. I’m the cobbler, and reboot when things start acting up.
FaaS: Firefox as a Service
Only the part with youtube. Don’t know if they are pulling some tricks on uBlock users, but about 10 tabs of youtube can get nasty, even with a somewhat recent workstation.
I don’t hold anything against you, OP, but… 30 tabs open for two weeks makes me feel yucky on the inside.
Hahajahajaha
I have like 90?
Sorry, eh. (Yea, I know I shouldn’t, but I’m lazy)
Lol I open them to look at later, and I also open lots songs on youtube to listen to and switch between songs rather than reopen the songs over and over I just keep it open.
You can bookmark webpages to come back to later and even organize them in trees by category. You can ceeate a playlist of songs from youtube and import it to a service with no ads like piped, then shuffle it. If you’re willing to put up with 30+ open tabs these are much less time consuming than scrolling through the default way it situates tabs, AND there aren’t 30 open tabs sucking your resources.
If you already knew all this, I’m almost sorry.
I’m almost sorry
Hahahahaha oh boy the comments here today are great!
(I’m one of those who never reboots, never closes Firefox).
Personally, if I bookmark something, the odds of ever getting back to it are very, very low, and so are the odds of deleting obsolete bookmarks of unread news etc. But the songs tips are great, I’ll have to look into it, thank you!
And 30 tabs is very tame.
I do have bookmarks for music too, I used to open more than 30. I now bookmark lot of them. Trying to reduce numbers of tabs little by little, I used to open so many tabs that I got an arrow and had to press it to reach the other tabs.
I am still sane compared to these people:
https://libreddit.projectsegfau.lt/r/chrome/comments/ev9fi9/so_how_many_tabs_do_you_have_open
Oh, the 20 tabs thing is perfectly reasonable. But I’m one of those crazy people who completely shuts down his computer every night, including closing my browser. Been using computers for too many years to trust a browser to not leak memory.
Dawg I had like ~35 tabs open and hadn’t restarted my PC in over three weeks. Fucking Firefox was sucking back 80 gigs of RAM. 80 fucking gigs.
On the bright side all the tabs were still loaded when I clicked through them.
I’ve seen poorly made websites taking gigabytes of RAM before. It’s not firefox’ fault they do that.
True that, I just thought it was crazy. I had recently upgraded to 96 gigs of RAM and I just never imagined a browser would actually suck up that much.
If you had 80GB worth of websites that did something actually useful with it, you’d want Firefox to use it all.
I usually have dozens of tabs loaded due to usage and I want Firefox to keep all of them into memory so that I can switch between them quicker.
Though I do also want Firefox to shed load by unloading some of them whe I need memory for something else. There just simply isn’t a mechanism in Linux to do that AFAIK; Firefox will happily keep all of its tabs loaded all the way until OOM eventhough it could shed most of them with little impact on user experience. There isn’t a way for the kernel to ask applications to shed memory load on their own and I think there should be.
macOS has such a mechanism and Firefox uses it but it didn’t have much effect IME, so it might have been bugged. That was a good while ago that I tested it though.
I can’t wait for Servo to be finished so I can move away from Firefox, it uses way too much memory.
I’m so hyped as well! Just read their monthly update blog today actually! I’m mostly hyped because it’s the first actual new web browser in a very, very long time, and that’s just plain exciting!
Servo won’t protect you against shitty websites gobbling up memory.
It will still lower memory usage considerably, Firefox uses way more memory than Chrome. Memory optimization is horrible in Firefox.
[citation needed]
I test firefox vs edge in my pc, both with ublock origin. Firefox noticeably uses more ram than edge which uses same engine as chrome.
Here this person saw the same results as me: https://libreddit.bus-hit.me/r/firefox/comments/18gp19l/ram_usage_in_firefox_vs_edge
Their methodology (and therefore likely yours aswell) is flawed and it was immediately pointed out in that thread too: https://libreddit.bus-hit.me/r/firefox/comments/18gp19l/ram_usage_in_firefox_vs_edge/kd2u2pq/?context=3#kd2u2pq
Measuring the memory “a process” actually “uses” is not trivial.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/
I’ve got more than 30 open tabs, though in practice I don’t actually need ALL those tabs loaded. The extension unloads inactive tabs after a configurable time. You can also configure the extension so that pinned tabs are not unloaded, certain domains/URL patterns are not unloaded, etc.
That’s a healthy solution
Firefox can automatically discard tabs when available memory gets too short. You need to configure it to do that though and probably disable the 10min minimum open time too if you’re very short on memory.
You can see the worst offenders in firefox by using the hamburger menu then more tools and Task manager. You can sort by ram. YouTube likes to hold gigs of ram for some videos. Close the biggest offenders and you’ll get back close to normal speed.
Ding ding ding, the only good reply in this thread.
The symptoms described by OP smell like good old memory exhaustion.
This is some S tier trolling.
What?
Listen, not even Dexter is the kind of person to leave thirty tabs open for two weeks. You would have to be some kind of insane serial killer to do stuff like that.
Lol, guess I’m an insane serial killer then!
Come on 30 tabs is nothing, read the bug report. The guy in the bug report open about a 1000 in totals, I don’t even know how to keep up with that many tabs.
I currently have a bit over 2400 tabs open, and it has been roughly a month since I restarted firefox for being too laggy. It is becoming an issue again.
Seek help…
I’ve had this for years, I just exit and restart.
Check the RAM usage of each tab. My Firefox is constantly open at work, albeit with anywhere from 1-10 tabs, and it never gets slow. Only time I restart it is when Firefox updates.
If it’s related to the thread you posted then try Nightly?
That’s only in Nightly right now, unfortunately; it won’t make it out to Release until v134.
Also, can I ask why you’d leave your browser open for weeks? Just curious of the use case. The thread mentions having 5700-7000 open tabs, and I can’t fathom why someone would do that. It’s not like the websites disappear if you close the tab. Nothing to do with the problem though, you don’t have to answer.
some people use tabs as bookmarks 🤷
Also, can I ask why you’d leave your browser open for weeks?
This just begs the question, Why do you not leave it open?
To conserve resources / power? Like when I’m done using an app, I close it. When I’m done reading a website or using online banking, I close it. I don’t leave my email, games or music open after I’m doing using them either. I actually turn off / sleep my entire device when I’m done using it, but that’s not what my curiosity is about.
Sure. Personally I just close the tabs, tho.
Maybe because the software is designed to make that very practical and smooth. You also might point to hardware limitations, should you have a machine that doesn’t have a lot of RAM, or perhaps you might point to simplicity, and that you don’t want to have a cluttered taskbar.
But it’s kind of ironic that you would ask why not leave software open on a post where the problem was specifically mentioned as one that is solved by closing the software.
So perhaps another anecdote is in order. I currently running three instances of Firefox (different profiles) on a low-end Celeron laptop. I don’t usually shut them except sometimes by mistake. What I do do is close tabs, if only for simplicity’s sake (because idle tabs are unloaded from memory anyway). I’m experiencing no sluggishness issues.
I only have around 30 open and I don’t turn off the laptop, after a while firefox becomes sluggish and I have to restart it.
Have you tested with specific websites? Could it be a tab has some have JavaScript running constantly that’s causing the issue?
I haven’t tested it at my home laptops, but my work laptop all tabs become slow. I have to restart it every time.
You should try that nightly build for troubleshooting purposes
Also, because it forces you to restart the browser every night.
I had the same problem recently. Especially the youtube UI became very unresponsive and would take several seconds to respond. I have 96G ram…
I downloaded ESR instead. So far so good.
