Task manager Firefox iterations

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I’m running Win7 Pro on my desktop with plenty of RAM and HD capacity. I’m not going to look it up, but I think the clockrate is circa 3.8 Mhz. My default browser is Mozilla Firefox and it’s up to date.

When I’m working I generally have two or three application up and a number of iterations with Firefox. I’m resigned to the fact as I go, I’m going to have to reboot Firefox because everything starts bogging down. Yeah, I should keep the number of browser windows low, but I don’t always. Anyway, when things start bogging down I’ll shut all the browser windows and then, with Task Manager, in the processes tab I make sure Firefox is closed out.

I just did that, and shut off all the showing Firefox processes. Then I brought up Firefox to my default browser, duckduckgo. That’s all, nothing else but an Open Office Writer window, and my Thunderbird email GUI. Out of curiosity, I went to Task Manager and in Processes, there were seven instances of Firefox ranging from 17.000K to 240, 000K of memory.

This seems screwy to me. Right now I have only this page and I’ve got five iterations of Firefox in Processes ranging from 17,000K to 256,000K. Why isn’t there just one? Do I have something wrong here?

I realize this might be more of a Firefox issue, but can somebody tell me why it’s happening? Or do I have to drag myself sobbing to the Firefox forums. Which is a pain.

Thanks in advance for any help:

Orbit

 

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Bluetrix

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Multi-process has become the norm for most modern browsers, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc.

x86 browser versions will use a little less memory but have lower maximum memory limits.

Firefox ESR 60.7.0 can still be set to use a single process but that will end in a few months when it’s updated to the 68(?) branch.

There are still non-mainstream browsers that stick with a single process, I use Pale Moon and Basilisk (from the same stable, based on older FF but kept up to date) as my main browsers.

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Bluetrix, Microfix

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orbit wrote:

This seems screwy to me. Right now I have only this page and I’ve got five iterations of Firefox in Processes ranging from 17,000K to 256,000K. Why isn’t there just one? Do I have something wrong here? I realize this might be more of a Firefox issue, but can somebody tell me why it’s happening? Or do I have to drag myself sobbing to the Firefox forums. Which is a pain.

Do you care to do a small test to learn something about what those (7 in my case) do? I did, and found out a bunch about FF in the process. I then went to FF forums and read about it.

Open Task Manager and delete one instance of FF (anyone), then open a new tab/window in FF. Do this  (kill 1 FF process) at a time, you can use the open FF  tab/window just change websites in the open FF tab/window.

Edit: I see @satrow  provided information.

PS: @Microfix is our garu on FF  🙂

If not, post again and I will share what I know.

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I had this problem a good while back with lots of tabs open.
My way to fix this was to go into about:config and lower the memory usage when minimized:
In the search bar type (copy/paste): config.trim_on_minimize

If the preference name does not exist, it needs to be created.
Right-click on the background and select ‘New Boolean’
Enter the name when prompted: config.trim_on_minimize then set the value to TRUE
then restart Firefox.
Now once you use firefox for a while with lots of tabs open and it slows down, instead of restarting firefox, minimise the browser to the tray, then maximising the browser up again will free some memory.
HTH

If debian is good enough for NASA...

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Bluetrix

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Check if there is a web site that has a memory leak.

There is one site that I sometimes use for an extended time (lookups and replies), and the system slows to sluggishness – everything is being paged. Closing that tab drops memory from 99% to normal. It takes a while to close (FF non-responsive due to paging), so it is faster to kill FF with the Task Manager.

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? says:

if Orbit has multiple instances of FF running would post Bob99’s post #208690 help (in Windows/) “browser.tabs.remote.autostart” it limits my open instances to 1 rather than one for each open tab…

also Orbit check out Microfix’s AKB3000003:

https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/3000003-firefox-additional-security-telemetry-and-privacy-tweaks/

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