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Why Does a Single Firefox Tab Take Almost 1.5GB RAM?

6 points by syeare ↗ HN
There are no extensions besides uBlock Origin and Saka Key running Only a single message with some short text and code is open This is on a "cold start" after installing updates 16GB is definitely nowhere near enough anymore, it's almost like how 2GB was in 2016

9 comments

[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 36.4 ms ] thread
sminchev
There is Javascript interpreter, caches and other memory consuming things ;)
HerbManic
I suspect a lot of it is just a premptive cache. My daily runner laptop is a 2009 Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and Firefox only uses about 1.5GB max when there is about 20 tabs open. It tries to fit in with whatever system it is running on.

Back in 2006 I remember using Firefox on a WinXP system with only 128MB of RAM, while the start up time was dreadful, once it had finally mapped out the memory/swapped all the right parts to the HDD it was surprisingly snappy. I would guess it is still doing something like that now only it doesn't have to swap it out anywhere.

syeare
Although I'd like to read and respond to the reply made by Emre_Ozkan, it is unfortunately [flagged] and [dead]

Quite disappointing whenever I see this type of...of censorship, would this be considered??? I am sure there are many interesting perspectives and this is not the first occurrence of burying comments and/or responses that I have observed as a longtime lurker

late_night_fix
Cold start after updates make me think something didn't get clean properly.1.5GB for a single tab still feels like a bug rather than expected behavior.
[dead] IVski
[flagged]
mccr8
If you go to about:memory and click on "measure" you can see a bit of where the memory is going. The per-tab overhead isn't that high, but unfortunately there's quite a bit of overhead to have the browser open at all, so it looks rather silly when you have a single tab open.