The Famous Firefox Memory Leak

Brad R Saturday 05 May 2018 - 21:53:57  

I suppose I have led a charmed life. I have known for many years about the notorious Firefox "memory leak." This is when the browser allocates RAM from the operating system to display some page, and then neglects to release that RAM when done. This causes the RAM usage to steadily increase, until Firefox is using all available RAM. And yet I had never witnessed this myself, even on my wife's computer, where she would leave Firefox running for days with a dozen or more tabs open.

Enter Debian "Stretch" 64-bit.

I don't know if it's the version of Firefox included with "Stretch," or the build for a 64-bit system, but Firefox is now a RAM hog. With just six tabs open, and no browser activity except whatever Javascript is running on those web pages -- i.e., with the Firefox window minimized -- RAM consumption is increasing at roughly 100 MB per hour. There's only 2.2 GB unused at the moment, so I can expect the system to be paralyzed in about a day. And yes, it is paralyzed, as other tasks start getting written out to the swap space. (They're very slow to swap back in.)

With more tabs open, or active use of the browser, this happens faster. But even with an idle browser this happens -- another chap in our Linux Users Group has reported the identical problem.

Of course I have the latest Firefox version, and have disabled all plugins and extensions. A web search reveals others reporting this problem, as recently as a few months ago, and as far as a decade back. The only reported solution is to shut down and restart Firefox (which releases all the RAM it allocated).

Well, there's one other solution. I've read that Pale Moon browser does not exhibit this problem. And since this is a 64-bit Linux machine, Opera is once more an option. (I refuse to use Google's Chrome snoopware.) My wife really likes Firefox, but the annoyance level is pushing her to consider a different browser.
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