After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute or two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19 processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used. When I kill Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute or two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19 processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used. When I kill Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute or two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19 processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used. When I kill Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets
really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute or
two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19 processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used. When I kill
Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
On 12/11/2024 3:08 PM, Van Snyder wrote:
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets
really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute
or two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19
processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used.
When I kill Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few
hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
Brave Browser
https://brave.com/
-- have their own repository
On 12/12/24 04:08, Van Snyder wrote:
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
You conspicuously omit your hardware specifications; what CPU, how many
RAMs and how big is your swap partition?
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets
really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute
or two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19
processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used.
When I kill Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
On 12/11/24 15:08, Van Snyder wrote:
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 getsI call this "memory leakage". I don't know if actual code bugs, or the
really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute
or two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19
processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used.
When I kill Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few
hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
sloppy way Firefox allocates and frees memory. As far as I know, all
browsers suffer from this. If you find one which doesn't, let us know.
Paul
On 12/12/24 04:43, debian@kcburns.com wrote:
On 12/11/2024 3:08 PM, Van Snyder wrote:Brave has a bad reputation for tracking users and selling their personal information.
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets
really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute
or two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19
processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used.
When I kill Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few
hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
Brave Browser
https://brave.com/
-- have their own repository
..
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
(UTC+0800)
..............
On Thu, 2024-12-12 at 04:33 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets really >>> slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute or two for >>> wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19 processes running. >>> Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used. When I kill Firefox and >>> restart, things go back to normal for a few hours.You conspicuously omit your hardware specifications; what CPU, how many
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
RAMs and how big is your swap partition?
Four core Intel i3 at 2287 MHz.
4 GB RAM.
"free -m" says swap is 34 GB with 6.2 GB or 18% in use at the moment.
The 'Swap" graph in GKrellM is at about 10%. Who is right?
"free -m" says 3542 MB RAM out of 3783, or 93.6% in use. The "Mem" graph
in GKrellM is at 50%.Who is right?
Top memory users are firefox-esr at 220 MB + 100 MB shared, Evolution at
170 MB with 39 MB shared, KDE plasma shell at 79 MB with 26 MB shared,
Xorg at 20 MB with 25 MB shared. The rest are in the weeds. At less than
700 MB, these don't come even close to adding up to 3542 MB. Is the rest filled with disk cache buffers?
The symptom remains that if I kill firefox and restart it, things run a
lot faster for a few hours, and then bog down again.
Four core Intel i3 at 2287 MHz.
4 GB RAM.
"free -m" says swap is 34 GB with 6.2 GB or 18% in use at the moment. The 'Swap" graph in GKrellM is at about 10%. Who is right?
On Wed, 2024-12-11 at 20:39 +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
Don't leave Firefox running for days with tabs open - close it periodically?
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. If I close the windows manually,
firefox forgets what it was doing, so I kill it periodically. Maybe
more frequently than I have been doing.
MB has all the RAM it can take, so more RAM would require a new MB.
However, what depresses me is the number of responses suggesting
increasing memory etc. It's a sad state of affairs we have reached
where simple web browsing (and it *should* be simple) requires such significant resources. Even banking should not lead to lag in window management.
On Thu, 2024-12-12 at 05:32 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
The symptom remains that if I kill firefox and restart it, things run aI believe that 4GB of RAM is now not enough for web browsing, especially
lot faster for a few hours, and then bog down again.
with web browsing involving javascript.
Whether you continue to use Firefox, if you can, I suggest that you
upgrade your RAM, to as much as your motherboard will take. Whilst I do
not know what the pricing of RAM is like, now, it was, a while ago,
quite inexpensive, and, a desktop computer that I bought, with an i3
CPU, was upgraded to 32GB of RAM, as soon as I could, after buying it,
and, it has run well with that.
MB has all the RAM it can take, so more RAM would require a new MB.
On Wed, 2024-12-11 at 22:06 +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
Hello,
On Wed, Dec 11, 2024 at 02:01:53PM -0800, Van Snyder wrote:
MB has all the RAM it can take, so more RAM would require a new MB.
What is the motherboard out of interest?
From dmidecode:
Base Board Information
Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Product Name: H55M-S2H
However, what depresses me is the number of responses suggesting
increasing memory etc. It's a sad state of affairs we have reached
where simple web browsing (and it *should* be simple) requires such significant resources.
Even banking should not lead to lag in window
management.
But "top -o %MEM shows firefox at the top with 12.4 GB VIRT, 377 MB
res, 90 MB shr.
Who is right?
Many years ago, I believe when I was being taught 'C' programming, we were taught to use two instructions named malloc and (I believe the other important corresponding instruction), dealloc, [...]
and, some software, including
some web browsers (and, the vile javascript) seem to disregard that instruction and its importance, which is kind of like running an internal combustion engine without a governor, or, parking a vehicle on a slope, without engaging the handbrake.
I didn't know of uBO. Is it the best ad blocker? How do I install it?
I keep gmail, twitter, and facebook tabs, one page from EIA, and one page from my own server open.
I don't like to be that guy that says, "Works for me", but I don't
notice problems with Firefox here.
I do have 16GB of RAM
From reading the rest of the thread, IMO, the OP hasn't been running an
ad blocker which is just simply a necessity these days. I suspect that
even running uBlock Origin that the situation will improve. Another
step that may help is running a lighter DE such as Xfce.
On Thu, 2024-12-12 at 04:33 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
On 12/12/24 04:08, Van Snyder wrote:
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
You conspicuously omit your hardware specifications; what CPU, how many RAMs and how big is your swap partition?
Also, what kind of web pages are you browsing, Van, and are you using a proper plugin such as uBO to filter ads and other junk that can use an incredible amount of resources? Ad-blockers can really help with lower
end machines.
Hi,
On Wed, Dec 11, 2024 at 06:07:49PM -0600, Nate Bargmann wrote:
I don't like to be that guy that says, "Works for me", but I don't
notice problems with Firefox here.
[…]
I do have 16GB of RAM
You have four times the RAM of the OP. 4G is incredibly marginal spec
for a desktop 2024.
You could try temporarily setting your kernel command line to have
mem=4g and experience life that way for a couple of hours. My guess is
it runs like a dog for you too.
two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19 processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used. When I kill
Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets
really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute or
two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19 processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used. When I kill
Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
I have installed the NoScript extension in Firefox. I typically enable only enough JavaScript to get a site working. YouTube recently changed their site such that videos stall after about a minute if google.com is blocked. When I enabled google.com, Firefox became very sluggish.
On Wed, 2024-12-11 at 18:42 -0600, Nate Bargmann wrote:
You have four times the RAM of the OP. 4G is incredibly marginal spec
for a desktop 2024.
The first computer I was paid to write software for, in 1966, had 1,400
6-bit characters, not bytes,
called it the 1401. It was the first mass-produced computer. IBM sold
more than 28,000 of them. It was about the size of a four-drawer file cabinet. The clock speed was 83 kHz (not MHz, not GHz). Later in the
year it was upgraded to 16K. That added a box about the size of two side-by-side two-drawer file cabinets. I have a 63-phase FORTRAN II
compiler for it that runs in 8K. When they added a Tape controller, it
was another four-drawer file cabinet. Each drive was the size of a
fridge. The card reader and the printer were about the size of a spinet piano. But we did all the company's accounting on it, and accounting for about 1,000 customers nationwide on  three others like it. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, has two of them that work. It's
cool that they moved into an old SGI building at 1401 Shoreline Blvd.
The last program I wrote before I retired was only about 300,000 lines,
but it kept a cluster with 384 cores and 24 GB per core busy for 15
hours per day, on average, doing satellite instrument data analysis. Processing some days' data took 37 hours. Needless to say, if my code
had had memory leaks, it wouldn't have run that long. My employer had
much nicer computers than mine. The little "supercomputer" fit in one 9U
rack panel, but I wouldn't be able to afford water cooling or the
electricity bill at home.
When they COVID-exiled me, they wouldn't let me have the nice 8-core i7
with 32 GB that had been under my desk; they expected me to get by with
my home antique. I retired eighteen months later.
On 12/12/24 00:28, David Christensen wrote:
I have installed the NoScript extension in Firefox. I typically enable only
enough JavaScript to get a site working. YouTube recently changed their
site such that videos stall after about a minute if google.com is blocked. >> When I enabled google.com, Firefox became very sluggish.
Hmm I have Firefox with Noscript and watch a fair amount of Youtube. google.com does not get to run JS and I've noticed no ill effects.
Ghostery's blocking 7 things on that site (it says) and most of them have "Google" in the name. Perhaps that's the difference? There's also "Adblocker for Youtubeâ„¢".
(original email sent 11 Dec 2024 at 18:04)
Sure, but there's nothing we can do about that. Thus, we can only
recommend workarounds that are within our power.
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute or two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19 processes running. Memory is half full, and swapis about 10% used. When I kill Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
On Wed, 2024-12-11 at 18:42 -0600, Nate Bargmann wrote:
You have four times the RAM of the OP. 4G is incredibly marginalspec
for a desktop 2024.
The first computer I was paid to write software for, in 1966, had 1,400
6-bit characters...
Does your version of Firefox have the task manager feature - here, (using
FF 115.18.0esr on Windows) that's offered via the application hamburger
menu (at extreme rhs of toolbar in my FF) - More tools - Task Manager
... and it runs in one tab a monitor tool showing memory & cpu
consumption of each of the tabs that FF is processing. You might be able
to judge better which of your tabs are the hogs, if you can run that.
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets
really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute
or two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19
processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used.
When I kill Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few
hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
On 12/12/24 00:28, David Christensen wrote:
I have installed the NoScript extension in Firefox. I typically enable only
enough JavaScript to get a site working. YouTube recently changed their site such that videos stall after about a minute if google.com is blocked.Â
When I enabled google.com, Firefox became very sluggish.
Hmm I have Firefox with Noscript and watch a fair amount of Youtube. google.com does not get to run JS and I've noticed no ill effects.
Ghostery's blocking 7 things on that site (it says) and most of them have "Google" in the name. Perhaps that's the difference? There's also "Adblocker for Youtubeâ„¢".
On 12/12/24 20:00, Jeremy Nicoll wrote:
Does your version of Firefox have the task manager feature...
Thank you for that. I have not previously been aware of that.
I normally watch Youtube videos in Google Chrome. My experience is
that everything works well except certain live streams -- these will
consume more and more memory until the tab "crashes" with a "something
went wrong" message, and a Reload button. Pressing the Reload button reconnects to the live stream and then the cycle repeats.
I normally watch Youtube videos in Google Chrome. My experience is
that everything works well except certain live streams -- these will
consume more and more memory until the tab "crashes" with a "something
went wrong" message, and a Reload button. Pressing the Reload button reconnects to the live stream and then the cycle repeats.
On Thu, 2024-12-12 at 06:42 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
I believe that the problem, and, the reason that the Internet (on top of
which, runs, or, hobbles along, the World Wide Web, hobbled by the web
applications), is the malignant use of javascript client-side processing.
Shortly after it first arrived, javascript (as opposed to java) was described as "the world's best virus construction kit."
Hi,
On 12/12/24 10:16 am, Van Snyder wrote:
On Thu, 2024-12-12 at 06:42 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
I believe that the problem, and, the reason that the Internet (on top of >> which, runs, or, hobbles along, the World Wide Web, hobbled by the web
applications), is the malignant use of javascript client-side processing.
Shortly after it first arrived, javascript (as opposed to java) was described as "the world's best virus construction kit."
JavaScript need not be that bad, but the web developers at fault are the ones that SHOULD NOT HAVE jobs!
On 12/12/24 00:28, David Christensen wrote:
I have installed the NoScript extension in Firefox. I typically enable only
enough JavaScript to get a site working. YouTube recently changed their
site such that videos stall after about a minute if google.com is blocked. >> When I enabled google.com, Firefox became very sluggish.
Hmm I have Firefox with Noscript and watch a fair amount of Youtube. google.com does not get to run JS and I've noticed no ill effects.
Ghostery's blocking 7 things on that site (it says) and most of them have "Google" in the name. Perhaps that's the difference? There's also "Adblocker for Youtubeâ„¢".
and, some software, including
some web browsers (and, the vile javascript) seem to disregard that instruction and its importance, which is kind of like running an internal combustion engine without a governor, or, parking a vehicle on a slope, without engaging the handbrake.
These programs aren't written in C. Manual memory management is a dying
art. Most languages these days use automatic garbage collection, freeing unused memory when nothing is using it any longer.
This makes memory leaks less common, but when they *do* occur, they're
quite difficult to find. Usually it means you've accidentally retained
a reference to the object in question in some part of the program that
never goes away.
On Wednesday 11 December 2024 06:00:37 pm Greg Wooledge wrote:
This makes memory leaks less common, but when they *do* occur, they're quite difficult to find. Usually it means you've accidentally retained
a reference to the object in question in some part of the program that never goes away.
I'd really love it if firefox didn't consume increasing amounts of memory as time went on...
Why would it do that? That's been the case for a long time over many versions.
The first computer I was paid to write software for, in 1966, had 1,400 6-bit characters, not bytes,
Wasn't that data type named EBCDIC, or something like that?
In Firefox, amongst the other add-ons, I have Bluhell Firewall, uBlock Origin (I recommend those two , together, as a minimum) , AdBlocker Ultimate, AdGuard AdBlocker, AdBlock Plus, and, I think that is all f
the ab blocking and anti-tracking and general privacy add-ons that I
have.
I have privacy badger, ublock origin, adblock plus, and noscript currently.
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets
really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute or
two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19 processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used. When I kill
Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few hours.
On Thu, 2024-12-12 at 12:26 +0000, debian-user@howorth.org.uk wrote:
Van Snyder <van.snyder@sbcglobal.net
<mailto:van.snyder@sbcglobal.net>> wrote:
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets
really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute
or two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19
processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used.
When I kill Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few
hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
FF used to behave like that for me, but the current ESR release from
Mozilla no longer does that. You haven't said what version of FF you're
using, or anything about your hardware or software environment. So it's
pretty difficult to say anything else.
Firefox 115.140esr (64-bit) from Debian. I don't like to install
software from other sources because it frequently results in a mess of version incompatibilities.
Intel Core i3 530 that claims to run at 2.93 GHz, but /proc/cpuinfo
reports varying CPU clocks between 1.2 and 2.2 GHz, but all have the
same bogomips.
Gigabyte H55M-S2P motherboard.
Both RAM sockets have 4 GB installed, but dmidecode says only one is
working. Hmmm.
On 13/12/24 05:36, Van Snyder wrote:
On Thu, 2024-12-12 at 12:26 +0000, debian-user@howorth.org.uk wrote:If you install and run fastfetch, what does that show for the RAM?
Van Snyder <van.snyder@sbcglobal.net
<mailto:van.snyder@sbcglobal.net>> wrote:
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets
really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute >>>> or two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19
processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used.
When I kill Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few
hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
FF used to behave like that for me, but the current ESR release from
Mozilla no longer does that. You haven't said what version of FF you're
using, or anything about your hardware or software environment. So it's
pretty difficult to say anything else.
Firefox 115.140esr (64-bit) from Debian. I don't like to install
software from other sources because it frequently results in a mess of
version incompatibilities.
Intel Core i3 530 that claims to run at 2.93 GHz, but /proc/cpuinfo
reports varying CPU clocks between 1.2 and 2.2 GHz, but all have the
same bogomips.
Gigabyte H55M-S2P motherboard.
Both RAM sockets have 4 GB installed, but dmidecode says only one is
working. Hmmm.
..
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
(UTC+0800)
..............
Some languages have dynamic-memory facilities that inherently do not
leak, unless you are intentionally careless.
On Fri, 2024-12-13 at 05:41 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
On 13/12/24 05:36, Van Snyder wrote:
On Thu, 2024-12-12 at 12:26 +0000, debian-user@howorth.org.ukIf you install and run fastfetch, what does that show for the RAM?
<mailto:debian-user@howorth.org.uk>Â wrote:
Van Snyder <van.snyder@sbcglobal.net <mailto:van.snyder@sbcglobal.net> >>>> <mailto:van.snyder@sbcglobal.net <mailto:van.snyder@sbcglobal.net>>>
wrote:
After Firefox has been running for a few days my Debian 12.5 gets
really slow. The mouse jerks when it works at all. It takes a minute >>>>> or two for wndows to close or top. At the moment, Firefox has 19
processes running. Memory is half full, and swap is about 10% used.
When I kill Firefox and restart, things go back to normal for a few
hours.
What alternatives that aren't such pigs do you recommend?
FF used to behave like that for me, but the current ESR release from
Mozilla no longer does that. You haven't said what version of FF you're >>>> using, or anything about your hardware or software environment. So it's >>>> pretty difficult to say anything else.
Firefox 115.140esr (64-bit) from Debian. I don't like to install
software from other sources because it frequently results in a mess of
version incompatibilities.
Intel Core i3 530 that claims to run at 2.93 GHz, but /proc/cpuinfo
reports varying CPU clocks between 1.2 and 2.2 GHz, but all have the
same bogomips.
Gigabyte H55M-S2P motherboard.
Both RAM sockets have 4 GB installed, but dmidecode says only one is
working. Hmmm.
Same as "free -m" 3.7 GB.
I guess I need to pop open the cover and figure out why only RAM strip
is working.
..
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
(UTC+0800)
..............
On 13/12/24 05:56, Van Snyder wrote:
Because finding and fixing memory leaks is *really difficult*. And not >> much fun. And doesn't let you put fancy new blurbs on your "what's new" >> page.
Some languages have dynamic-memory facilities that inherently do not
leak, unless you are intentionally careless. But C and C++ are not in
that set.
C++ has a methodology called Resource Management. It's not at all
difficult to do and means you will not get resource leaks (memory usually)
Using the Resource Management methodology means major software
applications can be written in C++ to be fast and reliable - unlike the unmitigated crap that is java and dot net that are neither fast, nor reliable, nor write-once run anywhere.
This is why just about every browser is written in C++ and not in java
or dot net.
AI application similarly are written as C++/C core libraries with an optional veneer of python for those who are so inclined.
There is nothing more careless in adding an element to a hash tableIn languages that inherently do not leak (unless you are intentionally careless)
and
forgetting to remove it than in malloc()ing a memory area and
forgetting
to free()it.
I call this "memory leakage". I don't know if actual code bugs, or
the sloppy way Firefox allocates and frees memory. As far as I know,
all browsers suffer from this. If you find one which doesn't, let us
know.
I call this "memory leakage". I don't know if actual code bugs, or the
sloppy way Firefox allocates and frees memory. As far as I know, all
browsers suffer from this. If you find one which doesn't, let us know.
On Fri, 2024-12-13 at 16:54 +0100, Jan Claeys wrote:
I've
seen cases where force-reloading (Ctrl+F5) or closing one page that had
been loaded in a tab for a while, and then waiting a couple minutes to
give the JavaScript engine's garbage collector time to do its job,
freed about 8 GiB (!) of RAM afterwards...
Is there a menu item to force reload?
Ctrl+F5 on KDE is "switch to desktop 5."
On Fri, 2024-12-13 at 16:54 +0100, Jan Claeys wrote:
I've seen cases where force-reloading (Ctrl+F5) or closing one page
that had been loaded in a tab for a while, and then waiting a
couple minutes to give the JavaScript engine's garbage collector
time to do its job, freed about 8 GiB (!) of RAM afterwards...
Is there a menu item to force reload?
Ctrl+F5 on KDE is "switch to desktop 5."
| Sysop: | Keyop |
|---|---|
| Location: | Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK |
| Users: | 546 |
| Nodes: | 16 (0 / 16) |
| Uptime: | 168:44:54 |
| Calls: | 10,385 |
| Calls today: | 2 |
| Files: | 14,057 |
| Messages: | 6,416,551 |