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Comment by dr_zoidberg | Hacker News Reader

When they first announced this model I ended up in the group that had this "feature" enabled. It was completely useless. I was almost about to change the browser for Chrome because I could barely broswe a few minutes before it crashed due to excessive CPU and memory usage. And then I got another update which reverted back to the old single process architecture.

If it's as messed up as it was back then, it looks like I'll be having to switch broswer. I have a similar usage pattern as yours, with the added disadvantage that I group my tabs in windows, and every window seems to carry a big overhead.

Btw, I'm not "memory constrained", I always have 2 to 5 GB free memory, but once the firefox process is over 1,5 GB then trouble begins, at 2 GB it's about to crash, and over that it can sometimes survive as large as 2,5 GB, but I've never seen it use more -- it always crashes before reaching 3 GB.

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It has improved dramatically since then. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I think you should give it another shot instead of complaining about how bad it used to be.

I'm still using Firefox, just dread the day this feature comes back. It is now disabled in my settings, I just wish they make it optional instead of mandatory, because for my use case it brings serious stability issues.

I remember that phase, it was below-alpha quality. It's now okay, no fear to have, only some occasional hiccups like asynchronous errors (click somewhere at time T, click action triggered regarding the element at time T+x).

You can't use beta software and complain about stability issues.

What? You were going to switch browsers because you were having problems using a beta or nightly version? I have an idea... Use the release version!

Release has even worse memory issues, I had to go beta to get memory usage down and prevent crashes in the first place.

Memory issues? I have have never had any memory issues with Firefox and it's been almost crash free now for the last six releases.

It's 2016 now so maybe it's time to upgrade your box and it's 4 GB of RAM.

EDIT: How is Firefox eating up to 3Gb of RAM on your machine? I never seen mine go over 1.5GB and that's been after a week of not closing it (64-bit version/no Flash installed).

200 tabs split in 12 windows, each window seem to carry a big overhead. Btw, I said "2 to 5 GB of free RAM", so that means I have more than 4 GB total... pay a bit more attention before being pedantic.

I read your comments just fine but you weren't making sense but now you explained it. 200 tabs in 12 windows? Yeah, nobody cares your browser is crashing now. You can switch to Chrome and maybe it won't crash as much but it will use more memory.

Personally, I would reevaluate how you use browser.

I've easily gotten it up to 4GB. Five windows, several tens of tabs per window. Webapps like GMail (2 instances of it), GCal (also 2), Facebook, Tweetdeck, Slack, etc. open all the time eat a ton of RAM, and just various complex websites/apps sitting open over time will often leak a bit.

I just restarted FF an hour or so ago, and haven't even had it reload most of the tabs that used to be open (FF restored them, they're just not loaded yet as I haven't tabbed to them), and I'm already at 1.5GB resident with probably 15 active/loaded tabs.

It doesn't sound like you are doing anything much different than me except I don't use Facebook. I normally keep my browser open for weeks at a time and never break 2GB unless hit some crap website. Addons?

Could be. I haven't tried disabling any of them to see if they're causing high mem usage. Good next step, thanks.

> Btw, I'm not "memory constrained", I always have 2 to 5 GB free memory, but once the firefox process is over 1,5 GB then trouble begins, at 2 GB it's about to crash, and over that it can sometimes survive as large as 2,5 GB, but I've never seen it use more -- it always crashes before reaching 3 GB.

Was this for a 64-bit build of Firefox?

Yes, 64 bit beta. Took a a bit of digging to find it, but it was the first thing I checked once I began seeing this crashes. The only thing that fixed it was when it went back to the single process architecture.

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