1913215 - Firefox uses too much memory upon opening with no tabs

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Performance: General, defect)

Description

[zackkonietzny]

Attachment: memory-report.json.gz

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0

Steps to reproduce:

Closes, and re-opened Firefox. Restarted computer, and re-opened Firefox.

Actual results:

Same issue. 52% of memory usage (616mb) dedicated to opening and running Firefox with 1 tab (this one).

Expected results:

Less memory usage for only 1 tab opened (this one) in 1 browser

Comment 1

[zackkonietzny]

Machine specs are: i5-6300HQ, GT 950M, 12GB DDR4 Ram, 256GB SSD, Windows 10 Home 22H2

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

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

Comment 3

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

This bug was moved into the Performance component.

:zackkonietzny, could you make sure the following information is on this bug?

• For slowness or high CPU usage, capture a profile with http://profiler.firefox.com/, upload it and share the link here.
• ✅ For memory usage issues, capture a memory dump from about:memory and attach it to this bug.
• Troubleshooting information: Go to about:support, click "Copy raw data to clipboard", paste it into a file, save it, and attach the file here.

If the requested information is already in the bug, please confirm it is recent.

Thank you.

Comment 4

[Frank Doty [:fdoty]]

Removing perf impact flag and adding to memory investigation meta bu - please continue to provide additional details to help us remedy any possible issues

Comment 5

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Redirect a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user to the triage owner.
:fdoty, since the bug has recent activity, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 6

[Frank Doty [:fdoty]]

Ignore comment 3 as a memory dump has already been provided. Are you still experiencing this issue on the latest Fx version? (v131 as of this comment)

Comment 7

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

I don't see anything shocking in this memory report. This looks like just the amount of memory for a fresh session. Mccr8, do you have an opinion on this?

Comment 8

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

Yes, unfortunately there's a lot of overhead just to have the browser open, so the memory per tab is very bad when there's only one tan open. This overhead is needed to provide the level of performance and security users expect from a modern browser. If you have more tabs open, then the overhead isn't as bad.

The 126mb for SWGL looks like a decent amount, but maybe it just has that kind of overhead, and even if that was eliminated entirely, there would still be hundreds of MB of memory.

If you very tight on memory, running an ad blocker could prevent ads from loading, which end up in their own process, so that's a bit of overhead.

Comment 9

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

We are always trying to improve Firefox's memory, but unfortunately there are no easy fixes for the "single tab memory" problem.