Re: I think Firefox is crashing my system
On 2025-08-16 14:54:32 -0400, rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:
> I'm going to chime in here, even though I am running some older versions of
> Debian and Firefox (newest is 103).
I'm using Firefox 141 (firefox package), but issues with it are not
new.
> I have found that:
>
> * Firefox uses a lot of memory, especially when I have a lot of tabs open
Same here (well, several windows and lots of tabs). Note that Firefox
has a concept of "unloaded tabs" to free the memory, and I would
expect that background tabs remained unloaded when starting Firefox.
Still, it takes a lot of memory.
YouTube also sometimes takes more and more memory, even though the
video is not playing:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1964852
> * When free memory gets low (maybe to 0), I experience the same systems
> described by the OP -- everything locks up (and the hard disk light goes on
> solid).
This is what happened in the past when I was using swap. So I ended up
by disabling swap entirely with "swapoff -a". I haven't noticed such an
issue on my most recent laptop, but I have only 1 GB of swap for 32 GB
of RAM.
However, the OOM killer was killing random processes, in particular
daemons (see above bug). I avoided this issue by installing earlyoom
and running it with the --sort-by-rss option (in /etc/default/earlyoom):
https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom/issues/344
The issue for the behavior without earlyoom and the behavior with
earlyoom without the sort-by-rss option (daemons being killed rather
than the broken Firefox tab) is actually due to systemd, which yields
the oom_score_adj=200 value for these systemd services.
> I've taken to do the following:
>
> * I keep a konsole window open running top with my firefox window positioned
> on top of it but offset so I can see the free memory number and the resident
> memory column.
>
> * I pay attention especially to the free memory number, and when it gets
> low ...
>
> * I kill firefox related tasks (not firefox itself), like (in my version of
> Firefox) "Web Content", "Isolated Web Co", "Privileged Web Co", and
> "WebExtensions" (as they are named on top).
>
> I use a command like =killall -o 12h Content= -- the -o 12h option
> in hopes of not deleting the most recent versions of those files --
> I'm not sure that works ;-)
It seems that the contents of the tabs correspond to "Isolated Web Co"
(this is such a process that was taking more and more memory in my
case).
> I then find that my tabs still exist, in most cases with the URL, but no
> content displayed on the page.
Yes, killing the process associated with a tab leaves the tab in place,
which then shows something like "the tab has crashed".
> I can press <F5> on any tab (in the window) to
> reload the content. (Some tabs, especially searches (ddg and such) don't
> maintain the URL.)
>
> As long as I do this, I avoid the symptoms the OP described.
If this is a particular tab that takes much memory, I suggest to
try earlyoom with the --sort-by-rss option as I did.
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
Reply to: