To preface, I have had a thread about this previously,

https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/840667/How-can-you-troubleshoot-a-crash-from-freezing

Ultimately, it didn’t result in much.

Cue a few months, a lot has happened, and I have a new PC. Different graphics card vendor, different RAM, different motherboard vendor. Almost everything is different.

The crashes stopped, in fact I didn’t notice them for a long time.

Past few days however, I noticed youtube videos starting to skip a bit. Thought it might just be youtube.

Then today happened. After about a month, I had a crash again. The PC has been left on for about a week (which is not really uncommon for me).

What I noticed that caught my eye…is that when i went to close it in task manager, it was using 14 GB. Just to be fair, I made sure before completing this post that I kicked every tab I had open out of inactive.

They are currently sitting at 5 GB.

What is occurring that is causing Firefox, under the same amount of active tabs (in fact possibly more, since I do have auto tab discard, so most of these tabs would not usually be active) to reach 3x the amount of ram they actually use?

I would like to get it to stop crashing, but it seems like even under a different hardware configuration, all I’ve done is make it take longer for it to actually happen, which makes me think even more that the it’s an issue with memory.

  • @muhyb
    7•24 days ago

    My system is always on sleep when I turn my PC off and Firefox is always open. I close Firefox from system update to system update and it hasn’t crashed on me for quite a long time. Hopefully this doesn’t change.

    Inactive tabs shouldn’t cause a problem but you can use something like Simple Tab Groups to prevent them to stack too much, might help.

    Having a bigger swap partition also might help, if you have 16 GB RAM.

    Edit: Also just like others mentioned, try to run Firefox without any add-ons to see if that happens again. You can also do this in reverse, deactivating your add-ons one by one and use Firefox like that for a while, until the occurrence stops.