Does anyone have this issue were firefox becomes slow if left open for a long time. In my case after a couple of weeks rendering becomes slow and when I use youtube for example if is laggy, just trying to change volume taka few second to show the volume bar. It also happens to my laptop at work. I have around 30 tabs open.
Under
about:unloads, you will see a list of open tabs, sorted by resource usage. You can click-spam the “Unload” button until that list is empty, or until the most resource-intensive tabs are off the list.This does not require any third-party dependencies, and the tab will still be present on top. The site will reload once the tab is selected again.
Are we all going to ignore this person had Firefox open for weeks?
Yes.
Stop trying to shame people for using their damn computer.
Stop downvoting people who treat computers the way they ought to work! Needing to restart shit, with any regularity, is a flaw. Some of us are doing work, god dammit, and having to get things set up from scratch is a pain in the ass.
All the stuff I have open is open for a reason. The fact it all gradually stops working is not excused by the fact it can be unfucked by a hard reset. It’s supposed to keep working.
What you’re describing is called a resource leak. Something, an extension, a background process, etc., is holding onto resources for too long without cleaning itself up automatically.
This is pretty common in writing code, and extremely difficult to prevent except in closed and well understood systems. A browser is anything but that, due to the nature of needing to work on any website doing whatever they want.
It’s either you need more RAM or you must learn to use a tab group extension. Also, if it gets slow, just restart it.
Simple Tab Groups is a nice add-on.
My personal favourite is Sidebery. It has vertical tabs and easily navigatable via mouse wheel. You can even unload a tab. And has tons of customization options.
Most software in general has hard to detect issues after several weeks of uptime. Its something that’s fundamentally hard to test and fix. Its a big reason why “did you turn it off and on again” is such universal advice.
Yes it happens. As others have said: just restart.
What might not be as clear: when you restart, if it doesn’t just come up and offer to restore your session, you can go to History and Restore Previous Session. This reopens all your tabs (actually, they won’t fully reload until you view them).
Or just use bookmarks like a normal person
Bookmarks are for really important stuff. Open tabs are for stuff I want to be able to easily stumble back upon, but I won’t be butthurt if I dont.
There’s nothing wrong with having more than one way to categorize stuff.
Edit: and considering that session data is also written to disk, there really isn’t much difference between bookmarks and open tabs anyway.
There is, when your way consumes resources absurdly.
It doesn’t. When you reset it, they take very little resources until you actually load them.
they have an entirely different use case
Close everything and start fresh
Your productivity shouldn’t rely on keeping one piece of software running for long periods of time.
I don’t hold anything against you, OP, but… 30 tabs open for two weeks makes me feel yucky on the inside.
Yeah, I get twitchy when I have more than about ten tabs open. My senior regularly has thousands, across multiple browser windows. There are two types of people.
I have multiple Firefox windows with around 1-1.5k tabs on each, and they have been opened (and re opened) since about a year.
I ❤️ tabs, they make me feel all warm on the insideHahajahajaha
I have like 90?
Sorry, eh. (Yea, I know I shouldn’t, but I’m lazy)
Lol I open them to look at later, and I also open lots songs on youtube to listen to and switch between songs rather than reopen the songs over and over I just keep it open.
You can bookmark webpages to come back to later and even organize them in trees by category. You can ceeate a playlist of songs from youtube and import it to a service with no ads like piped, then shuffle it. If you’re willing to put up with 30+ open tabs these are much less time consuming than scrolling through the default way it situates tabs, AND there aren’t 30 open tabs sucking your resources.
If you already knew all this, I’m almost sorry.
I’m almost sorry
Hahahahaha oh boy the comments here today are great!
(I’m one of those who never reboots, never closes Firefox).
Personally, if I bookmark something, the odds of ever getting back to it are very, very low, and so are the odds of deleting obsolete bookmarks of unread news etc. But the songs tips are great, I’ll have to look into it, thank you!
And 30 tabs is very tame.
I do have bookmarks for music too, I used to open more than 30. I now bookmark lot of them. Trying to reduce numbers of tabs little by little, I used to open so many tabs that I got an arrow and had to press it to reach the other tabs.
I am still sane compared to these people:
https://libreddit.projectsegfau.lt/r/chrome/comments/ev9fi9/so_how_many_tabs_do_you_have_open
Oh, the 20 tabs thing is perfectly reasonable. But I’m one of those crazy people who completely shuts down his computer every night, including closing my browser. Been using computers for too many years to trust a browser to not leak memory.
Why would you need your browser, let alone your PC on for weeks without any break
Because I’m doing stuff.
My laptop with a non-critical service: Uptime: 9 weeks, 5 hours, 34 minutes
I’ve had Debian VMs run for long periods of time without me touching them. They normally would have high uptime unless it automatically reboots to apply a kernel update. The key is these are virtualized servers. You should absolutely avoid running to long without a reboot. The longer you wait the greater the chance of something breaking on the next boot. There is also the issue of memory fragmentation but that’s not really an issue these days.
I just have docker containers serving up some self-hostable service for myself.
I don’t think I’ve seen or heard of issues not rebooting for too long recently. Aside from not getting security updates or bug fixes, what would be some problems that could happen if a system has been running for too long?
It might not come back up after power loss.
Also you do want security updates. It is a bad idea to not install them.
Could you elaborate on it not coming back up after a power loss? Assuming these services can get restarted after booting without the need for a user login, why and how would a previous long uptime lead to a possible failure of these services to be spun back up? I apologize if these questions sound dumb and have obvious answers, but I genuinely do not know, and it’s why I’m asking.
And I’m not in any way trying to say I don’t want security updates. I’m asking that aside from security updates and bug fixes, are there any downsides to a long uptime? Please treat the question as one of curiosity.
It can happen because of simple things such as a hardware failure or because the kernel was removed 3 weeks prior. Its unlikely but it always will come at the worse time.
Also rebooting after any update makes sure that all services have been restarted and are using the newest libraries.
I’m sorry but I fail to see how these problems would be tied to having a long
uptime(note the inline code block, as I mean the output of that command instead of uptime in an SLA, which is typically described as high or low instead of long or short). I have yet to find mentions where long uptime leads to higher chance of hardware failures as of recent. If some critical library or the kernel was removed some weeks prior to a reboot, I don’t think long or short uptimes would change your encounter of these issues.And security patches are good, I agree. But there are instances where you don’t need it, eg in an airtight infrastructure, meant just for internal users, of which has no access to the Internet. You fall back to more traditional approaches to security in such cases.
As far as whether a service is properly restarted due to library updates, in a containerized environment, you wouldn’t have issues with library version mismatches, or missing libraries, or any sort of failure to restart due to dependencies getting changed without human attention (note that you can automate container updates, but you are then putting trust into whoever is publishing that container).
I’m not sure if it’s a lack of understanding of what my question is asking, or some other reason, but if you would please take the time to carefully read my questions and answer more appropriately and with clarity, that would be much appreciated.
Why would I say goodbye to a good friend?
FaaS: Firefox as a Service
Lol, cause we’re all lazy gits.
Cobbler’s kids have the worst shoes. I’m the cobbler, and reboot when things start acting up.
Try using a tab suspend extension, something like ‘auto tab discard’. Firefox has one built-in, but it’s not aggressive enough.
You can see the worst offenders in firefox by using the hamburger menu then more tools and Task manager. You can sort by ram. YouTube likes to hold gigs of ram for some videos. Close the biggest offenders and you’ll get back close to normal speed.
Ding ding ding, the only good reply in this thread.
The symptoms described by OP smell like good old memory exhaustion.
I’ve had this for years, I just exit and restart.
Only the part with youtube. Don’t know if they are pulling some tricks on uBlock users, but about 10 tabs of youtube can get nasty, even with a somewhat recent workstation.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/
I’ve got more than 30 open tabs, though in practice I don’t actually need ALL those tabs loaded. The extension unloads inactive tabs after a configurable time. You can also configure the extension so that pinned tabs are not unloaded, certain domains/URL patterns are not unloaded, etc.
Firefox can automatically discard tabs when available memory gets too short. You need to configure it to do that though and probably disable the 10min minimum open time too if you’re very short on memory.
That’s a healthy solution
