BrowserWorks
Latest release (6.5.10) has a major Memory Management regression
What happened?
Ever since updating to 6.5.10, my Waterfox's memory use has doubled and several times has reached 10 gigabytes despite only having 5 tabs open consistently. At the time of writing this report, Waterfox's usage exceeds 3 gigabytes, despite only having those 5 tabs + 1 for Qwant + 1 for this GitHub page.
Reproducible?
- [x] I have checked that this issue cannot be reproduced on Mozilla Firefox.
Version
G6
What platform are you seeing the problem on?
Windows
Relevant log output
There haven't been that many changes between ESR bases, so I'm unsure what may be related. Have any of your installed extensions updated (if you have any installed?)
Does the memory keep increasing? Website's may have updated their code as well, unless there's an active memory leak, the browser uses the memory it needs. Memory actually being used isn't a bad thing, it is if it's not used properly.
It stays consistently in a certain range (typically 2-3 GB, which is already 500 megabytes to 1 gigabyte over its previous use), until random times like when it decides to skyrocket to the 10 gigabytes of usage mentioned before. The most recent extension update was June 13th for ProtonPass - two weeks prior to 6.5.10's release - and the memory issue was not present until 6.5.10 was installed.
The whole "memory actually being used isn't a bad thing" is a rather outdated myth... if Waterfox is using 10 gigabytes of RAM to hold a whole 5 tabs in memory (which is obscene and has caused system instability several times in the last few days), then that's 10 gigabytes that cannot be used by another application as Waterfox will not release that memory due to having the request held on it - and not everyone is running on 64+ gigabyte RAM super-rigs.
On artix linux I observe the following when opening a gitea page, for several seconds:
- memory used is over 19GB
- cpu load very high
Disabling all add-ons does not help, nor changing any performance setting.
We're also seeing crashes which are probably related. Version 6.5.9 and 6.6.0 do not show the memory problem nor the crashes. Is it possible to build 6.5.10 with a different firefox-esr version?
I've tracked down the cause of the crashes; waterfox 6.5.9 is built with firefox-esr 128.12.0 which crashes when run standalone
On artix linux I observe the following when opening a gitea page, for several seconds:
* memory used is over 19GB * cpu load very highDisabling all add-ons does not help, nor changing any performance setting.
I'm just guessing here but: AFAIK artix isn't using systemd but something else. That something could be the cause of your problem. I'm using pure-blood Arch Linux with systemd, currently 7 tabs are open (2 of which are paused YT videos, 1 FB, 1 Github, 2 tabs for other social platforms and 1 tab for settings) and the browser "eats" only 280 MB RAM - that includes the process waterfox-g + the few "Web Content" processes. There's also something else that I have disabled on my end and which your probably know nothing about: a thing called "huge pages" with RAM which only causes problems very similar to yours. Or, in other words - when "huge pages" is active, the free RAM isn't cleared AT ALL but rather leaving it at the last used state, which might make you think the browser is using 19 GB RAM when in reality - it's not. I would suggest you make sure it's not "huge pages" that causes the problem, here are a few results on how to disable it in linux (will require a reboot after disabling it): https://duckduckgo.com/?q=arch+linux+how+to+disable+huge+pages&ia=web
Please note: I'm not trying to be a smart a55, I'm just not entirely sure this memory usage you see is real. There's no other way to find that out but disabling this "huge pages" BS and then use browser again as you normally do.
I'm not the only one observing this and not the OP. The crashes also occur on bsd and garuda iirc.
@artist4artix
I've tracked down the cause of the crashes; waterfox 6.5.9 is built with firefox-esr 128.12.0 which crashes when run standalone
I assume you mean 6.5.10, and I'm sure that's understood based on the previous context, but for posterity - you should correct it if you did in fact mean 6.5.10 and not 6.5.9.
@rado84-github
On artix linux I observe the following when opening a gitea page, for several seconds:
* memory used is over 19GB * cpu load very highDisabling all add-ons does not help, nor changing any performance setting.
I'm just guessing here but: AFAIK artix isn't using systemd but something else. That something could be the cause of your ...
Please note: I'm not trying to be a smart a55, I'm just not entirely sure this memory usage you see is real. There's no other way to find that out but disabling this "huge pages" BS and then use browser again as you normally do.
While that might be the issue that particular user is having, it's not mine - I'm on Windows. Windows does have a similar setting called "Large Pages" which is disabled by default because it causes notable additional load on the RAM and CPU, and it is not something I have interest in turning on because my browser use is secondary to my programming, gaming, 3D design work, and so on, that I do daily.
Im unsure if this is related, but I have noticed severely degraded performance on more memory intensive tabs (such as image boards and boorus, as well as commission pages) the last few weeks. Often times to recover the entire browser back, I need to end process with taskmgr and re-open.
