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Distribution: VM Host: Slackware-current, VM Guests: Artix, Venom, antiX, Gentoo, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenIndiana
Posts: 1,006
Rep:
Quote:
Originally Posted by orbea
That was my impression as well, but it could be something that firefox is doing differently that exacerbates the problem. However I am certain I clearly would not be happy with other browsers for different reasons so I would much rather work to mitigate or fix the issue I have with firefox. Given the time it took to reproduce the issue after creating this thread, it may be already mostly mitigated and I had around 150 tabs in my previous firefox session before it occurred. This new session is currently at 150 tabs and I have 1.75 MB swapped with just zram and no swap activated which is what I was experiencing for most of the previous firefox session as well. As long as it only swaps such a small amount its not really a problem, the system only lags after swapping 20-30 MB or more.
I wonder if you ever checked firefox memory use per webpage?
If you would I doubt that you will open this topic.
You have 8GB RAM and 150 tabs open that is 53.33MB/tab (and this is without even counting system/other apps sunning)
Are you really so surprised that system is swapping?
I wonder if you ever checked firefox memory use per webpage?
How?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aeterna
If you would I doubt that you will open this topic.
You have 8GB RAM and 150 tabs open that is 53.33MB/tab (and this is without even counting system/other apps sunning)
Are you really so surprised that system is swapping?
I used to be able to have firefox sessions with 1000+ tabs without any such problems, then rust happened.
As long as it only swaps such a small amount its not really a problem, the system only lags after swapping 20-30 MB or more.
The commands I asked for don't show any evidence of a problem. Some (small) swap usage is not unusual - dormant pages are better there than in memory. On the other hand 20-30 MB of writes (of any kind) causing an issue points to deeper problems with your I/O system. If that was a typo and should be GB, get data for such a time. Use a timer script to write the data every 30 seconds or somesuch. Include ps_mem output for the same timings.
I start to notice slow downs after around 20-30 MBs are swapped. The system is very slow after a few hundred MBs are swapped which is not an unusual occurrence and sometimes its a few GBs. My hard drive with the swap partition is rather old and not that fast.
Distribution: VM Host: Slackware-current, VM Guests: Artix, Venom, antiX, Gentoo, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenIndiana
Posts: 1,006
Rep:
Quote:
Originally Posted by orbea
How?
open a new tab and enter:
about:memory
press "Measure" button
look for:
Web Content (pid xxx)
Explicit Allocations
on the right side of the panel you will be able to do search for specific page or just click on
Quote:
I used to be able to have firefox sessions with 1000+ tabs without any such problems, then rust happened.
Still all this has nothing to do with firefox:
disabling swap will never work. It was pointed out several times by kernel devs that disabling swap will not prevent kernel from swapping. It will swap anyway if needed.
open terminal window and enter
run
Quote:
free -m
next run
Quote:
echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
then run again
Quote:
free -m
to see how much memory was released and see if this will speed up your system
To be honest, I would revert all the tweaks that you tried as this mix may be counterproductive, then if you really insist, check one by one modification and see if system responsiveness changed.
Thanks for spelling that out. Currently with 43 tabs about:memory shows 156.53 MB under web content.
I did not disable the swap partition to stop it from swapping, but to test if having more sawp than physical memory was contributing to this problem. I was lazy and disabled the swap while leaving the zram in place to have this effect.
I tried your commands.
Code:
$ free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 7929 2788 1650 306 3490 4298
Swap: 6143 3 6140
$ echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
Password:
3
$ free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 7929 2297 4963 307 668 4911
Swap: 6143 3 6140
It might be more revealing to wait for this to occur again and try it then instead.
Also I am reluctant to undo the tweaks which seem to have largely mitigated this issue. Before I implemented them I could sometimes reproduce this with fresh firefox sessions using a new profile and a single tab.
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