Yep, that’s my typical pattern too. I’ve been seeing the older versions creep into those high ranges for a while, though it’s only in the last few months that I was consistently running into issues of it randomly freezing for long periods of time. I’ll be very happy if the memory usage stays down for me now with the update, so I’m a little worried to hear someone else is seeing the runaway issue still.
I’ve seen some brief issues since installing the new noscript version (firefox pops up a yellow banner saying that “something” is slowing things down, which isn’t totally helpful, unless you happen to only have changed one thing). Those issues have seemed pretty rare, though.
Well, I just noticed one thing I hadn’t spotted when I replied… it looks like both firefox and chrome now have most of their memory usage under “background processes” rather than under the main “app” process (in the win10 task manager). So that makes it a bit more difficult to really judge how much is being used. Counting those up, it looks like FF is using closer to what it was in the older versions.
I’m actually a little disappointed in Chrome now that I’ve seen that… 486MB across 8 background processes just for four open tabs…
Yeah I don’t group it that way by default, but before I restarted FF the top FF process was 1.7GB… which way more than what I see now which is on par with what I see for Chrome.
ETA the details tab seems the best option to see things.
Well, until the 57 update, the main “app” process has always been the only one I’ve seen (as its memory usage has spiraled ever upwards). I’ve never seen separate background processes before for Firefox, and I end up looking through my processes a lot. Don’t know what’s up there, then.
Ok, I got curious enough to really try to get a more apples-to-apples test for my own peace of mind. I closed out all my firefox tabs (after saving them, of course), restarted FF and chrome, and opened the same set of tabs in both browsers. It’s not entirely an even comparison since I have two addons in FF and none in chrome.
For my initial test set of 8 tabs in 2 windows (according to task manager, with all the processes added up), chrome is using 885M ram, while firefox is using 1.51G ram. So, roughly 600MB difference.
Loading up a third window with 14 of my original set of tabs in both browsers, I got: 2.06G in FF, 1.64G in Chrome. The difference has dropped a bit.
With my original full set of 40 tabs in FF, I was sitting at 2.2G usage.
I’m not quite motivated enough to load all 40 tabs in both browsers to compare, but I’ll leave the set I have currently open overnight to look for changes.
At least initially, based on this rough comparison, it does look like FF on my system is using a lot more memory initially, but less per additional tab. YMMV, and (as I said) this obviously isn’t a completely equal test.
Based on watching the CPU column the 2 main tabs are the forums here and at the other place both at about 500MB each. The other tabs are gmail, yahoo mail, and feedly. I tend to close out other tabs when I am done.
