1833991 - Firefox uses 400MB of memory with no tabs open

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Core :: Performance, enhancement)

Description

[ayush222006]

Attachment: memory-report.json.gz

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/113.0

Steps to reproduce:

I opened up some Pdf documents in the browser
and closed them all after a few minutes

Actual results:

The browser was taking unexpectedly 300 mb with no website open just new tab
on windows
on linux the same issue persists
the browser at idle without any websites open takes up to 400mb

I have 11 extensions in total and only 4 of them is enabled which is
React Dev tools, Ublock origin, Touch Vpn, Youtube search engine

Expected results:

The browser mustn't use that much ram at all without nothing open.
it's quite bad for the ones including me with restricted hardware.

Comment 1

[Paul Bone [:pbone]]

Firefox will release some of the memory right away when tabs are closed or pages & extensions otherwise release memory. Other memory requires some time to release, eg it must wait for a garbage collection (GC). Does it get better if you force a GC using the "Minimise memory usage" button in the about:memory page?

How much memory does Firefox use before opening the PDFs?

Is this true for other pages or do you need to open PDFs to reproduce this?

Comment 2

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

Unfortunately there is a fair amount of memory overhead to just having the browser open, so the report you attached isn't too out of line.

Your WebExtensions process is taking almost 200MB of memory, which is a bit high. It looks like the Touch VPN addon is using up almost 60MB of memory. About 42MB of that is strings, which look like images.

There's another 50MB of structured-clone-holder, which I think are used to send data to the extension process, so maybe that's related.

Comment 3

[Dave Hunt [:davehunt] [he/him] ⌚BST]

With no answer from the reporter, we don’t have enough data to reproduce and/or fix this issue. Please reopen or file a new bug with more information if you see it again. Details of our performance triage process can be found at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Triage.