firefox swap issue
by orbea from LinuxQuestions.org on (#4TRFR)
I have been having a problem with firefox in current for a while which still affects mozilla-firefox-68.2.0esr.
Basically when I have very little ram usage firefox will insist on using the swap instead which proceeds to drag the system to a halt. Sometimes it can swap several GBs while I have most of my ram unused. Is anyone else experiencing this? Any ideas how to solve it short of switching to a different browser? I have tried blocking scripts, avoiding potentially problematic sites which does not seem to be entirely consistent, firefox safe mode, a new firefox profile and nothing helps. I have found many tips on reducing ram usage online, but while they did help reduce ram usage, they did not stop the underlying problem.
I have 8 GB ram where 4 GB is tmpfs, 16 GB swap and 6 GB of zram. Turning off the zram did not help and I do not want to remove my swap because it occasionally actually prevents the system from running out of memory.
Basically when I have very little ram usage firefox will insist on using the swap instead which proceeds to drag the system to a halt. Sometimes it can swap several GBs while I have most of my ram unused. Is anyone else experiencing this? Any ideas how to solve it short of switching to a different browser? I have tried blocking scripts, avoiding potentially problematic sites which does not seem to be entirely consistent, firefox safe mode, a new firefox profile and nothing helps. I have found many tips on reducing ram usage online, but while they did help reduce ram usage, they did not stop the underlying problem.
I have 8 GB ram where 4 GB is tmpfs, 16 GB swap and 6 GB of zram. Turning off the zram did not help and I do not want to remove my swap because it occasionally actually prevents the system from running out of memory.