879222 - Firefox uses too much RAM instead of using local hard disk

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 675539

(Firefox :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Description

[t8av]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130511120803

Steps to reproduce:

I open about 10-25 tabs viewing Facebook picture albums. Some of the pages contained large number of images.





Actual results:

Firefox became very slow and eventually crashed.
AVG reported that Firefox uses more than 1GB memory.


Expected results:

Firefox should release memory for inactive tabs (tabs that are not currently being viewed) and save its data to hard disk.

Even for active tabs, firefox should limit the memory that is consumed, and save older data to hard disk.

Comment 1

[Jesper Hansen]

Please use https://support.mozilla.org/ if you're having crashing issues.
Firefox will use the memory it has available. If you want Firefox to use the harddisk then it will become even slower.

Comment 2

[t8av]

Jeseper

At least give the user the option, at times of very slow browser response, to save all (or most) of tabs RAM data in the Hard disk, in order to go back to normal/faster browser behavior.

An action "Save/move tabs data to hard drive" should exist.

Comment 3

[t8av]

(In reply to Jesper Hansen from comment #1)
> Please use https://support.mozilla.org/ if you're having crashing issues.
> Firefox will use the memory it has available. If you want Firefox to use the
> harddisk then it will become even slower.

I have no intention of using  https://support.mozilla.org. A browser should simply work for typical webpages without the endless need of support.

For example, when I entered:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.249643668390327.59885.243836702304357&type=3

I tried to scroll down in this page. Firefox responded in two steps:
1. Slowness.
2. Crash.

I tried this page in IE and it works fine.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Jesper Hansen from comment #1)
> Please use https://support.mozilla.org/ if you're having crashing issues.
> Firefox will use the memory it has available. If you want Firefox to use the
> harddisk then it will become even slower.

I'm not sure invalid is appropriate here just because there is possibility of crash. That said, 
a) reporter should have mentioned you tested in safe mode
b) t8av is a prolific bug reporter, so it will REALLY be helpful and preferable for him/her to reproduce proglems on the nightly build https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/ - which has code roughly 2 months newer - before filing any bug report. (because clearly you have the skills to do so - which is a compliment)
c) when you say it crashes you should supply the crash report ID.
d) as a reporter, it's probably not a good idea to assume what the solution to a problem might be. as such, your bug summary "uses too much RAM instead of using local hard disk" is misleading. 

That said, https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.249643668390327.59885.243836702304357&type=3 works for me. And I know there have been fixes to image display that might have helped here

Comment 5

[t8av]

Wayne Mery,

1. Thanks for the compliment. 

2. The URL that I mentioned (https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.249643668390327.59885.243836702304357&type=3) works now fine for me.

3. I can see two possible reasons why this page works much better than before:

  A. Yesterday I deleted all browsing history. "browsing history" is a known factor to cause browser slowness. I mentioned this factor in some other bugs that I reported.

  B. Could be the image display fixes that you mentioned.

4. I still insist that an action "Save/move tabs data to hard drive" should exist. I changed this bug report to "enhancement".

5. I am reporting bugs as a contribution to the Firefox community, and also to improve my own web-surfing experience. I am not filling-in bugs to fulfill any kind of obsession.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to t8av from comment #5)
> 5. I am reporting bugs as a contribution to the Firefox community, and also
> to improve my own web-surfing experience. I am not filling-in bugs to
> fulfill any kind of obsession.
I wasn't suggested otherwise. What I was suggesting is your reports would be more valuable if the contained the types of information listed so that others can more easily reproduce them, and were reported with one of the 


> 4. I still insist that an action "Save/move tabs data to hard drive" should
> exist. I changed this bug report to "enhancement".

Then that should have been the title of your bug report.
This is a duplicate.

Comment 7

[Ciprian Muresan [:cmuresan], Ecosystem QA]

Hi Wayne Mery,

I made some digging in bugzilla and have not managed to find any duplicates to this. What I found were some issues regarding tab hibernation (Bug 675539). Maybe I haven't been searching the right thing. Can you provide a link with the main issue / enhancement so I can update this one as duplicate ?

Thanks,
Cipri

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I think 675539 is a fair choice