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  • RE: Firefox

    From Maureen L Thomas@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 7 03:40:01 2024
    This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
    There was an upgrade so I did it and it is now even worse as far as
    getting pages to load.  I keep getting error 404, and other messages.
    But if I copy the addy and put it in Web it comes up right away.  What
    the hell is going on.  I love firefox but can I install an old one
    without a ton of problems coming up.

    I am on Debian 12 with the latest update done.  I am using a HP that is approved for Linux and it works fine.  For what ever reason Opera will
    not install at all it needs lots of dependencies.  I tried to install on
    the command line but it stated that it did but I could not find it
    anywhere.  Anyway this old lady is pissed.  Any help is greatly appreciated.

    Moe

    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
    <head>

    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
    </head>
    <body>
    <p>There was an upgrade so I did it and it is now even worse as far
    as getting pages to load.  I keep getting error 404, and other
    messages. But if I copy the addy and put it in Web it comes up
    right away.  What the hell is going on.  I love firefox but can I
    install an old one without a ton of problems coming up.  <br>
    </p>
    <p>I am on Debian 12 with the latest update done.  I am using a HP
    that is approved for Linux and it works fine.  For what ever
    reason Opera will not install at all it needs lots of
    dependencies.  I tried to install on the command line but it
    stated that it did but I could not find it anywhere.  Anyway this
    old lady is pissed.  Any help is greatly appreciated.</p>
    <p>Moe<br>
    </p>
    </body>
    </html>

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  • From Greg Wooledge@21:1/5 to William Torrez Corea on Mon Feb 10 04:40:01 2025
    On Sun, Feb 09, 2025 at 21:18:31 -0600, William Torrez Corea wrote:
    Firefox is using much memory and using swap memory:

    I have 8GB memory DDR3L 1600MHz

    What do you expect us to tell you?

    Web browsers are bloated monsters. If you aren't using any extensions
    that might be leaking memory, then there is nothing you can do except
    get more memory, or open fewer tabs, or avoid sites that use Javascript
    code that might be leaking memory. Or some combination of the above.

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  • From David Wright@21:1/5 to William Torrez Corea on Mon Feb 10 06:10:02 2025
    On Sun 09 Feb 2025 at 21:18:31 (-0600), William Torrez Corea wrote:
    Firefox is using much memory and using swap memory:

    I have 8GB memory DDR3L 1600MHz

    Memory: 93% 7.2GiB
    Swap: 31% 2.7GiB

    Kill it and restart it occasionally.

    If you keep a lot of tabs open, then either avoid visiting too many of
    them at one time, or close some of the less frequently visited ones.

    Avoid stepping through the open tabs with Ctrl-PageUp/Down, as that
    consumes more memory with each tab. Instead, click on the ▽ button
    in the extreme topright corner, which lists all the tabs, then select
    the one you want. You can also close tabs, with ×, from this list.

    With only 8GB + ½GB of swap, I restart FF every morning, carrying over
    about 150 tabs in one window and half-a-dozen in another at present.

    Cheers,
    David.

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  • From Eyal Lebedinsky@21:1/5 to David Wright on Mon Feb 10 07:30:01 2025
    On 10/2/25 16:06, David Wright wrote:
    On Sun 09 Feb 2025 at 21:18:31 (-0600), William Torrez Corea wrote:
    Firefox is using much memory and using swap memory:

    I have 8GB memory DDR3L 1600MHz

    Memory: 93% 7.2GiB
    Swap: 31% 2.7GiB

    Kill it and restart it occasionally.

    Rather than kill it, what I do is:
    Ctrl Shift J # open Browser Console
    Ctrl Alt R # restart firefox

    YMMV

    If you keep a lot of tabs open, then either avoid visiting too many of
    them at one time, or close some of the less frequently visited ones.

    Avoid stepping through the open tabs with Ctrl-PageUp/Down, as that
    consumes more memory with each tab. Instead, click on the ▽ button
    in the extreme topright corner, which lists all the tabs, then select
    the one you want. You can also close tabs, with ×, from this list.

    With only 8GB + ½GB of swap, I restart FF every morning, carrying over
    about 150 tabs in one window and half-a-dozen in another at present.

    Cheers,
    David.


    --
    Eyal at Home (eyal@eyal.emu.id.au)

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  • From Bret Busby@21:1/5 to William Torrez Corea on Mon Feb 10 08:10:01 2025
    On 10/2/25 11:18, William Torrez Corea wrote:
    Firefox is using much memory and using swap memory:

    I have 8GB memory DDR3L 1600MHz

    Memory: 93% 7.2GiB
    Swap: 31% 2.7GiB


    So, how many windows and tabs do you have open?

    And, "conspicuous by its absence", in your message, is the version
    number of Firefox, that you are running.

    Also, how much of your RAM, is being used by Firefox?

    Is the 8GB of RAM, sufficient to run the Linux kernel version that you
    are running?

    I (sometimes) use the rule of no more than 1 Firefox window per GB of RAM.

    What ad-blocking and privacy plugins are you using?

    Installing and running uBlock Origins and Bluhell Firewall, as a
    minimum, would be practical.

    You do not state what CPU you are using, or, what is the maximum RAM
    that your motherboard will support.

    With only 8GB of RAM, you should probably be running lynx as a web
    browser, or, maybe, if you need graphics, Epiphany, instead of Firefox.

    To run Firefox, I recommend, as an absolute minimum, 16GB RAM, and
    running no more than about 12 windows of Firefox.

    If your motherboard can support more RAM, then you should increase your
    RAM to the maximum capacity supported by your motherboard.

    Those are simply my opinions.

    Oh, and, a dedicated Firefox mailing list exists, as has, I believe,
    been previously mentioned on this mailing list.

    ..
    Bret Busby
    Armadale
    West Australia
    (UTC+0800)
    ..............

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  • From Karl Vogel@21:1/5 to All on Mon Feb 10 10:50:01 2025
    On Sun 09 Feb 2025 at 23:06:47 (-0600), David Wright wrote:
    On Sun 09 Feb 2025 at 21:18:31 (-0600), William Torrez Corea wrote:
    Firefox is using much memory and using swap memory.
    I have 8GB memory DDR3L 1600MHz

    Memory: 93% 7.2GiB
    Swap: 31% 2.7GiB

    I minimize the swap leakage by doing this hourly, or Firefox grows until
    it becomes unresponsive:

    swapoff -a && swapon -a

    When this fails (I'll see a syslog message), time to restart.

    Kill it and restart it occasionally.

    I do that every 3-4 weeks to clean the SQLite DB files under my profile:

    for file in *.sqlite; do
    echo 'vacuum;' | sqlite3 $file
    done

    Avoid stepping through the open tabs with Ctrl-PageUp/Down, as that
    consumes more memory with each tab.

    Actually, I step through the tabs after restarting Firefox. That doesn't
    cause me any problems until I've been running for 20-25 days, as long
    as I force everything off swap periodically.

    --
    Karl Vogel I don't speak for anyone but myself

    May someone replace your printer's standard ink with a foul, vengeful tar
    made from discarded Waffle House cooking oil. --James Mickens

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  • From Yassine Chaouche@21:1/5 to All on Mon Feb 10 11:20:02 2025
    Le 2/10/25 à 04:18, William Torrez Corea a écrit :
    Firefox is using much memory and using swap memory:

    Hello William.
    I recommend installing the Great Suspender / Tab Suspender extension.
    It will save you a few gigs of RAM by putting unused tabs on sleep.

    Best,

    --
    yassine -- sysadm
    http://about.me/ychaouche

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  • From Lucas Rufkahr@21:1/5 to All on Mon Feb 10 16:20:01 2025
    Some people are just used to operating on their own disorganization lol!

    On Feb 10, 2025, at 9:03 AM, Greg <curtyshoo@gmail.com> wrote:

    On 2025-02-10, Cindy Sue Causey <butterflybytes@gmail.com> wrote:

    Ditto on the "open fewer tabs" with news being the offenders in my usage
    case. One's a fairly trustworthy local Atlanta station, and the other
    mixes decent leads with flat out click bait.

    I've never understood people who say: I've got 580 open tabs. How can
    that be useful in any way?


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  • From Stefan Monnier@21:1/5 to All on Tue Feb 11 00:00:01 2025
    PS 32GB RAM, and it still locks up to the point that a hardware button
    reboot is necessary. That's up there in the inexcusable abuse range.

    You can mostly fix this problem by imposing a maximum to the amount of
    RAM used by a process.

    E.g. you can add a file `/etc/security/limits.d/10-mylimits.conf` which contains something like:

    # Limit processes's memory use to a max of 4GB so that a single
    # runaway process can't bring the machine down.
    * hard rss 4096000
    * hard data 12000000

    I guess with 32GB of RAM you can afford to use a higher limit than 4GB,
    but the idea is to make sure that a single runaway process can't eat up
    all the memory and make the whole machine unusable.

    [ Firefox is still perfectly usable on my i386 machine, so 4GB per process
    *should* not affect normal use. ]


    Stefan

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  • From Stefan Monnier@21:1/5 to All on Tue Feb 11 00:10:01 2025
    Web browsers are bloated monsters.
    (side note: just as desktop environments or even operating systems.)
    Does anybody have a bookmark for an article with a balanced view on degree
    of responsibility of
    - web site developers,
    - users,
    - browser developers
    in respect to browser resource consumption?

    Reminds me a "recent" rant of mine:

    https://oldbytes.space/deck/@monnier/113290809168999071

    The breadth and complexity of current HTML (which includes at least CSS, Javascript, and SVG, all of which can be nested in each other) means
    a competent browser is inevitably large. When you view simple webpages, Firefox is clearly bloated (I count 8 processes for a vanilla `firefox` visiting my trivial last-century-style home page at https://www-labs.iro.umontreal.ca/~monnier/, with an RSS of at least
    100MB). But that does not increase very much when visiting "reasonably complex" pages, so when you get to multi-GB it's usually squarely the
    fault of a web site.


    Stefan

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  • From Bret Busby@21:1/5 to David Wright on Tue Feb 11 10:10:01 2025
    On 11/2/25 09:08, David Wright wrote:

    <snip>
    Yes, that is my daily experience, though I almost always start FF
    with a script that opens the local wunderground 10-day forecast.
    I close that before pressing Restore.


    Whilst I use the wunderground 10 day forecast and PWS dashboard, both
    for a local weather station, I find that particular web site to be so
    badly written, that it can crash web browsers and computers, so, I
    currently access the web site, using only Epiphany running on an i5
    system with 16GB RAM, and the system monitor shows System Load Average
    9.18 and RAM 83% in use.

    I would not access the wunderground web site with Firefox. Too destructive.

    ..
    Bret Busby
    Armadale
    West Australia
    (UTC+0800)
    ..............

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  • From Roy J. Tellason, Sr.@21:1/5 to All on Tue Feb 11 19:30:02 2025
    On Tuesday 11 February 2025 04:05:25 am Bret Busby wrote:
    On 11/2/25 09:08, David Wright wrote:

    <snip>
    Yes, that is my daily experience, though I almost always start FF
    with a script that opens the local wunderground 10-day forecast.
    I close that before pressing Restore.

    Whilst I use the wunderground 10 day forecast and PWS dashboard, both
    for a local weather station, I find that particular web site to be so
    badly written, that it can crash web browsers and computers, so, I
    currently access the web site, using only Epiphany running on an i5
    system with 16GB RAM, and the system monitor shows System Load Average
    9.18 and RAM 83% in use.

    I would not access the wunderground web site with Firefox. Too destructive.

    ..
    Bret Busby
    Armadale
    West Australia
    (UTC+0800)

    We use that site fairly regularly, and don't have that problem here, not at all. Perhaps something else is causing that?

    --
    Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
    ablest -- form of life in this section of space,  a critter that can
    be killed but can't be tamed.  --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
    -
    Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

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  • From eben@gmx.us@21:1/5 to Yassine Chaouche on Tue Feb 11 23:40:01 2025
    On 2/10/25 05:04, Yassine Chaouche wrote:
    Le 2/10/25 à 04:18, William Torrez Corea a écrit :
    Firefox is using much memory and using swap memory:

    Hello William.
    I recommend installing the Great Suspender / Tab Suspender extension.
    It will save you a few gigs of RAM by putting unused tabs on sleep.

    Is there a way to manually suspend or crash a tab?

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  • From Yassine Chaouche@21:1/5 to All on Wed Feb 12 11:30:02 2025
    Le 2/11/25 à 23:39, eben@gmx.us a écrit :
    On 2/10/25 05:04, Yassine Chaouche wrote:
    Le 2/10/25 à 04:18, William Torrez Corea a écrit :
    Firefox is using much memory and using swap memory:

    Hello William.
    I recommend installing the Great Suspender / Tab Suspender extension.
    It will save you a few gigs of RAM by putting unused tabs on sleep.

    Is there a way to manually suspend or crash a tab?


    I don't know if you can do this natively in firefox,
    but with the tab suspender or auto tab discard extension you can select a particular tab and put it to sleep.
    otherwise, you may want to look at about:config and tweak the "unload" configuration items to your liking,
    particulary the browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory configuration item.
    It is set to false by default,
    you can set it to true and see if that helps.

    Best,

    --
    yassine -- sysadm
    http://about.me/ychaouche

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