Author Topic: Firefox 15 less of a memory hog (Read 79320 times)

daddydave · « **Reply #50 on:** September 01, 2012, 09:45 AM »

Even worse, i think opting out from installing the "adware/toolbar" i was unable to even run the browser.
I've got Windows 7 Home Ed. 64 bit at present time so it should work just the same no?

-dantheman (September 01, 2012, 09:16 AM)

Yes, I was able to opt out and then the new version of Waterfox installed fine. Try it again!

dantheman · « **Reply #51 on:** September 01, 2012, 10:02 AM »

DaddyDave, Waterfox installation worked this time but it uses more resources than Firefox 15.
It also has CPU spikes that i don't see with Firefox.

Tanks anyway.

But i'm really impressed by the overall performance of this Firefox 15!

So i think i'm going to be content for a long time to come.

40hz · « **Reply #52 on:** September 01, 2012, 12:46 PM »

Ok...just went through my FF add-ons for this machine and disabled Stylish and Tin Eye Reverse Image Search - and now FF15 is flying. (Note: machine is Core2-Duo running @2G/800 w/4Gb RAM)

<<Foul buzzer sounds and 40hz raises his hand so they can get his number>>

Guess I'll have to retract my earlier negative comments and apologize to the FF team.

dantheman · « **Reply #53 on:** September 01, 2012, 03:30 PM »

You're funny 40hz!

Mind you, i haven't finished testing F15 yet.
Still have to see how it responds to 5,000 opened tabs.
I rarely have more than 4 or 5 tabs opened but from what i've read elsewhere,
some people just don't seem to have enough tabs open.

40hz · « **Reply #54 on:** September 01, 2012, 04:17 PM »

You're funny 40hz!
-dantheman (September 01, 2012, 03:30 PM)

I get like that when I'm embarrassed about posting something stupid because I overlooked something obvious.

re: Tabs

Yeah...I'm amazed by the number some people keep open. Like you I seldom have more than three or four going at a time. And I close them almost as fast as I'm done with them. Still, I guess it's all how you're used to working. I use RSS feeds a lot, and I'll save stuff to either Pocket or Scrapbook so I seldom worry about missing or losing something I want to read. "Different strokes for different folks!" as the old song goes.

Curt · « **Reply #55 on:** September 01, 2012, 05:56 PM »

I am pleased with Waterfox 15 build 20120830123745, it is even faster than 14.
I have not (yet) seen any of those CPU spikes, dantheman spoke about.

dantheman · « **Reply #56 on:** September 01, 2012, 08:13 PM »

What can i tell you Curt?
Was it a temporary thing? Could be.
I did notice that nothing made it any speedier than Firefox 15.
Good for you if it works well on your system.

On a similar note, there's a recent post from an Opera user lamenting about crashing issues even a year after his/her initial post at their forum.
He/she seems to have to stick to older version while everything continues to be just fine and dandy on my computer.

dantheman · « **Reply #57 on:** September 02, 2012, 05:31 AM »

Update on Waterfox experience.
After re-installing this browser (just to be sure of CPU spikes and claimed speed improvements),
i can say that there still are CPU issues (non existent in Firefox 15) but it does seem to be better at page rendering.

Have to admit, i'm allergic to AVG (so i guess it made me apprehensive at first).

daddydave · « **Reply #58 on:** September 02, 2012, 07:53 AM »

I am back to regular Firefox again for now. I've had a lot of issues where the cursor goes into swirly mode when I try to switch tabs or scroll down, and been going back and forth between Firefox and Waterfox to try and remediate. (I suppose these would be CPU spikes, but I haven't really been checking Task Manager when it happens.) So I will give this new version a try in the Firefox main build.

cyberdiva · « **Reply #59 on:** September 02, 2012, 12:15 PM »

edit: hmm, mistake updating LastPass. Messed up Opera so it wouldn't even load. Had to do restore point. Turns out I don't see any big memory savings anyway. Back to 14.01 for me.
-MilesAhead (August 29, 2012, 10:50 PM)

I decided to set a restore point and then give Firefox 15 a try. I'm happy to report that I did not have your experience. After I installed FFx 15, I used Last Pass, and it worked fine. I then opened Opera, and Last Pass worked fine there, too. The Last Pass version that I have is 2.0, which I think I've had for several months. I didn't need to upgrade to 2.0.2: 2.0 works fine with both FFx 15 and Opera 12.02.

I'm not sure why my experience was different from yours, but I'm glad it was.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #60 on:** September 02, 2012, 01:50 PM »

edit: hmm, mistake updating LastPass. Messed up Opera so it wouldn't even load. Had to do restore point. Turns out I don't see any big memory savings anyway. Back to 14.01 for me.
-MilesAhead (August 29, 2012, 10:50 PM)

I decided to set a restore point and then give Firefox 15 a try. I'm happy to report that I did not have your experience. After I installed FFx 15, I used Last Pass, and it worked fine. I then opened Opera, and Last Pass worked fine there, too. The Last Pass version that I have is 2.0, which I think I've had for several months. I didn't need to upgrade to 2.0.2: 2.0 works fine with both FFx 15 and Opera 12.02.

I'm not sure why my experience was different from yours, but I'm glad it was.
-cyberdiva (September 02, 2012, 12:15 PM)

I'm glad you didn't encounter a glitch. I have interactions with LastPass Firefox and chromium snapshots. It's hard to tell which one causes the issue. Could be the chromium snapshot. But FF 14.01, LastPass 2.0, Opera 12.01, and chromium 23.x snapshot I'm using now all peacefully coexist. The FF change to 15 upset the apple cart.

Of course whichever is the primary browser is the one favored when sacrifices have to be made. I'd rather use an old FF than an old chromium. Opera I mainly use because it has a weirdy feature you can't get anywhere else that's handy on occasion, and for compatibility testing.

Likewise when I get an error in Chromium that the java plugin is out of date, chromium has that functionality built in. It's the one I install to use with FF that's old.

IainB · « **Reply #61 on:** September 02, 2012, 03:57 PM »

FF v16 on the ß development channel seems to be running nicely on my Win7-64 Home Premium laptop (Intel i7., 8Gb RAM) system. The only difference I can spot between this and the v15 is that:

(a) One of the cores periodically spikes up to 10 or 15 CPU cycles/sec (process is Firefox.exe), which accelerates the cooling fan for a few moments.
(b) Only one of my many FF add-ons - the Prospector Awesome Bar #14 - has been disabled by it. (A Mozilla labs project.)

Doesn't appear to run with any lags or problems.

Tuxman · « **Reply #62 on:** September 02, 2012, 03:59 PM »

Is there a list of currently active and still developed Mozilla Labs add-ons?

dantheman · « **Reply #63 on:** September 02, 2012, 05:26 PM »

After tinkering around with Chrome, Opera, Maxthon etc. for quite some time now,
i can say that it's the first time in a long while that i find satisfaction using Firefox.

BTW, Google Talk doesn't work for me in Waterfox (i like to make free calls to U.S./Canada).

IainB · « **Reply #64 on:** September 02, 2012, 11:27 PM »

Is there a list of currently active and still developed Mozilla Labs add-ons?
-Tuxman (September 02, 2012, 03:59 PM)

The Mozilla labs are described here: http://mozillalabs.com/
The Prospector bits are here: http://mozillalabs.com/en-US/prospector/
I think several of the Prospector bits may have been made obsolete/redundant or been disabled by the later FF v15/16 updates to the Awesome Bar.

Tuxman · « **Reply #65 on:** September 03, 2012, 02:15 AM »

Interesting. Thanks!

40hz · « **Reply #66 on:** September 04, 2012, 03:21 PM »

Ok...I think I'm going to rescind my apology to the FF dev team. For two days now I'm getting pages refusing to load due to server timeouts on sites I can reach on my POS iPhone browser with no problem. And that's going through the same router at the same time - so it's not likely a router or DNS issue. If I restart FF, the problem goes away for a few hours, but then starts up again. I thought disabling WOT and all the blocker add-ons might help the situation, but it didn't.

Anybody else seeing this? My CPU is only running at about 9% average on either core, and I'm using only 700Mb of 3.9Gb physical memory. (FF is using 205 of the 700Mb with maybe two or three tabs max opened on static webpages.). No activity on swap either.

And...I just now noticed that although I'm doing nothing but typing this post, FF is suddenly using 255Mb and climbing up slowly. And...it just dropped back to 205. Guess that could be called a spike?

dantheman · « **Reply #67 on:** September 04, 2012, 05:24 PM »

40hz, sorry to hear about your issues.

Resource and CPU usage seem to be pretty stable on my system.
All in all, i would say that Chrome and Firefox use pretty well the same amount.
With a little under 4G of RAM, it's not really an issue anymore.
Most people probably have something like that to run their Windows 7 no?
Otherwise, they're probably better off to run some Linux version.

I still have Opera on board which i find most akin to Firefox but i keep running back to the former.
They should have left it at Seamonkey... (forget what it was called before).
It's unbelievable how they still manage to make it better than Firefox+Thunderbird (with regards to resources).

40hz · « **Reply #68 on:** September 04, 2012, 06:06 PM »

Otherwise, they're probably better off to run some Linux version.
-dantheman (September 04, 2012, 05:24 PM)

I'm actually running it under Linux, which is why it's so frustrating for me.

I can usually nail an issue on that platform pretty quickly because I can see into the innards of the system as deeply as I need to go. So far, whatever is going on seems to be confined to something happening within FF. I was watching it earlier and the RAM usages was fluctuating up and down over a broad range (low around 205-210 and high just short of 390) with one tab open to DoCo's forum homepage and me doing nothing at all on FF.

Truly weird...I'll probably have to disable all extensions and then add them back one by one to see if there's a smoking gun in there somewhere. Hopefully it will be that simple and not some complex interaction between two or more.

I still have Opera on board which i find most akin to Firefox but i keep running back to the former.
-dantheman (September 04, 2012, 05:24 PM)

Yeah. Me too. If I could get the Sage RSS reader add-in on some other browser (or even an exact work-alike) I wouldn't be that bothered. But I've had a good workflow in place for several years now, and since FF is dead center of most of it I'm semi-stuck with it. Old habits and keyboard reflexes die hard I guess.

dantheman · « **Reply #69 on:** September 04, 2012, 06:40 PM »

As some Californians might still say "I catch your drift man!"

After reading up a few months ago, on the almost inevitable time to reset of Firefox, it wasn't an easy thing to do (habits) but i think it helped a bunch to keep it at par.

Feedly is pretty good but i still use Feeddemon (Windows only).

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #70 on:** September 04, 2012, 07:18 PM »

And...I just now noticed that although I'm doing nothing but typing this post, FF is suddenly using 255Mb and climbing up slowly. And...it just dropped back to 205. Guess that could be called a spike?

-40hz (September 04, 2012, 03:21 PM)

Hi 40hz, that is the same / similar spike I kept having, you'd think a simple type keypress or a scroll wouldn't jam your resources. (I wasn't checking memory, I focused on CPU spikes but same category.) So I presume you have installed the new FF15 and this is there? Funny thing, my CPU spikes went away when I installed that, though it COULD have been disabling a random plugin or two at the same time, hard to know.

But for a different type of spike, this time on app close, I ran one of the "derivatives" of FF. (First PaleMoon, then Cometbird). Those magically "fixed" that particular spike for "reasons unknown". So if you like FF conceptually but have these "mystery issues" (see my sig, that's where it came from, on a different app), try a FF derivative just for giggles and report in.

40hz · « **Reply #71 on:** September 04, 2012, 09:56 PM »

So if you like FF conceptually but have these "mystery issues" (see my sig, that's where it came from, on a different app), try a FF derivative just for giggles and report in.
-TaoPhoenix (September 04, 2012, 07:18 PM)

I'm willing to try anything to get a handle on what's happening here. I'm familiar w/PaleMoon and have used it before. I'll give that a try first.

Thx for the suggestion.

UPDATE: Oops. Nope. Those are Windows only and I'm running on Linux. Oh well. <**sigh*>

dantheman · « **Reply #72 on:** September 05, 2012, 07:10 AM »

Sometimes i wonder if Martin of GHacks reads the posts here.
Check out his recent article:
http://www.ghacks.ne...is-caused-by-addons/

update: removing Adblock Plus (ugh!) has decreased memory consumption by half!

IainB · « **Reply #73 on:** September 05, 2012, 06:40 PM »

Reading through these discussion comments just now, I wondered whether the people who had been experiencing FF problems or FF performance issues had tried to adjust the thing's performance via about::config settings.
There's a lot of advice/experience on the internet about tweaking FF performance via the about::config settings, and I have been using it to good effect for years (literally). That could affect scores of things - e.g., like cache size, disc/RAM caching, threads for stream parsing, etc.

Maybe that's why I could never understand why people had FF performance issues in v15 = because my FF settings are peculiar to me, and got that way incrementally over time. It's not like I run FF "Lite" either - the "Dump List" add-on tells me I have 96 items (not all enabled though), so my setup has it's own share of "bloat".

dantheman · « **Reply #74 on:** September 05, 2012, 07:33 PM »

Very interesting IainB!

Perhaps you can share with us a few of those more prominent ones?
There are many posts on the web. Some i've tried in the past (to no avail).