I'm on a Win10 machine and use the latest version of Firefox. FF is my main browser. It was working fine till something happened a few weeks ago. I noticed a very weird behaviour. My machine would slow down and come to a dead stop. I was eager to find out what caused this freezing and started an investigation. Virus scan was negative, so that was a good sign. I opened the task manager and found out that Firefox was the program requiring most of the RAM. I closed FF and my machine returned to its original speed. That confirmed my suspicion, FF was the cause. A google search revealed that this issue was not isolated. There are numerous reports on FF using up to 12 GB RAM which is enormous - and insane.
I was then trying different things: I removed the add-ons, restricted the memory usage, resetted the program - nothing worked. Even an un-install and a re-install did not solve the issue. There were several reports on a processing loop when it came to http3 protocols but the suggested actions were useless.
As a last resort I tried to limit the RAM usage with the task manager. FF has multiple processes which are displayed as a group. If you open that group you see the RAM used by the different processes:
You can see that FF is using almost 6GB of RAM. And this is happening with only one tab open with static content (no videos or fancy graphics). I opened the process tree and saw that one process in particular is using a HUGE amount of RAM. Unfortunately the PID of that process changes after a restart, so writing it down and searching for it would not lead to a useful result.
I then did something which I usually would never do: I selected that process and clicked on "end task". And guess what happened:
The amount of RAM dropped to 1/10th of its original size! Sometimes it even dropped down to 1/20th of it. I expected the program to act strangely and even shut down but that was not the case. I was able to use it as usual and did not notice any strange or unusual behaviour.
Finding this out kept me occupied for almost a week.
Then I read some news that the issue had been fixed by an update. I was relieved, ran the update and everything looked fine again. RAM went up to 2 - 2.5 GB but that was still manageable. No freezing of the system. However, a few days after the update the same thing happened again and the RAM use shot up. I was at a loss, but as soon as I killed that process I mentioned above everything was fine again.
I have no idea what's going on but maybe this tip may be helpful or even help in finding a definite solution.
I was then trying different things: I removed the add-ons, restricted the memory usage, resetted the program - nothing worked. Even an un-install and a re-install did not solve the issue. There were several reports on a processing loop when it came to http3 protocols but the suggested actions were useless.
As a last resort I tried to limit the RAM usage with the task manager. FF has multiple processes which are displayed as a group. If you open that group you see the RAM used by the different processes:
You can see that FF is using almost 6GB of RAM. And this is happening with only one tab open with static content (no videos or fancy graphics). I opened the process tree and saw that one process in particular is using a HUGE amount of RAM. Unfortunately the PID of that process changes after a restart, so writing it down and searching for it would not lead to a useful result.
I then did something which I usually would never do: I selected that process and clicked on "end task". And guess what happened:
The amount of RAM dropped to 1/10th of its original size! Sometimes it even dropped down to 1/20th of it. I expected the program to act strangely and even shut down but that was not the case. I was able to use it as usual and did not notice any strange or unusual behaviour.
Finding this out kept me occupied for almost a week.
Then I read some news that the issue had been fixed by an update. I was relieved, ran the update and everything looked fine again. RAM went up to 2 - 2.5 GB but that was still manageable. No freezing of the system. However, a few days after the update the same thing happened again and the RAM use shot up. I was at a loss, but as soon as I killed that process I mentioned above everything was fine again.
I have no idea what's going on but maybe this tip may be helpful or even help in finding a definite solution.
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