1849888 - Firefox becomes slower over time on MacOS Ventura 13.5 (M1 Max Pro)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1808223

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, defect, P3)

Description

[seitansama420]

Attachment: memory_reports.zip

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/116.0

Steps to reproduce:

Nothing in particular: I'm simply using Firefox for my day-to-day needs.

Actual results:

When I do a "cold start" of the Firefox process, everything runs smoothly. Then, after, say, a period of 5 days, it starts becoming noticeably slower. After 10 days, there's an observable latency of ~1-2 sec when switching to the Firefox window, i.e. it's non-responsive during that time.

Perhaps this issue is related to the one discussed in the following Reddit thread I found: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/qr15hb/switching_to_firefox_with_commandtab_on_mac_has_a/

My guess is that there is an excessive amount of memory leaks and / or several page faults that happen during this time interval. When I restart Firefox, the issue disappears temporarily, but it reappears again after ~5 days.

I saved two snapshots of Firefox's memory reports, one on the 18th of August and another one on the 23rd. For example, I can see the following differences on these two reports:

Main Process (pid 56559)

• "path": "explicit/gfx/font-charmaps"
  • 18 aug: "amount": 17696
  • 23 aug: "amount": 52800
• "path": "page-faults-soft"
  • 18 aug: "amount": 57033
  • 23 aug: "amount": 7849578
• "path": "page-faults-hard"
  • 18 aug: "amount": 3113
  • 23 aug: "amount": 3531
• "path": "heap-allocated"
  • 18 aug: "amount": 194345664
  • 23 aug: "amount": 312500432

I'm using MacOS Ventura 13.5 on a MacBook Pro M1 Max with latest Firefox: v116.0.3 (64-bit). Additionally, the only extension I use is "uBlock origin".

I've included the two memory reports as attached files (zipped). Please let me know if I can provide any additional information that can help with debugging this - it's my first time creating a Bugzilla issue (hopefully not a duplicate one).

Thanks in advance!

Expected results:

There should be no difference (i.e. increase in this case) of latency over time.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Widget: Cocoa' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:spohl, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 3

[Stephen A Pohl]

Could you capture a performance profile when this occurs? https://profiler.firefox.com/

Comment 4

[seitansama420]

(In reply to Stephen A Pohl [:spohl] from comment #3)

Could you capture a performance profile when this occurs? https://profiler.firefox.com/

Yes, you can find the profile here: https://share.firefox.dev/3ZkcRR5. I opened a new FF window and cmd-tab'd a couple of times from / to it, to capture the latency I mentioned above (~1.5 sec).

Thanks for looking into this; happy to provide additional information that could be useful.

Comment 5

[Stephen A Pohl]

Thank you. This looks like a duplicate of bug 1808223, which I'm actively looking into.

Comment 6

[seitansama420]

Gotcha, I'll keep an eye on that ticket then.

Again, thanks for the quick turnaround!