https://i.imgur.com/jZNoC0I.png
Zero windows, 3.5GB of memory used. Sitting around, it's not as if that memory gets cleaned up.
The frustrating part is trying to be "good" and not have hundreds of tabs open at any point doesn't seem to help -- the memory still piles up, eventually driving the responsiveness of the entire system into the shitter.
I'm surprised to see Firefox taking up 3.5GB of RAM. On my Windows 7 PC, it takes about 1GB after a day's browsing (without Flash). I usually have 80-100 tabs but only 15-20 are actually open. It's fine unless Flash goes ape and eats 2GB of RAM for no reason.
I also use Vivaldi and Opera on Windows 7. Both are based on Chromium and both consume more RAM than Firefox. Vivaldi does "lazy loading" so it only loads tabs when you click on them, whereas Opera still tries to load everything.)
Similar horrendous effect on the performance of everything else on the computer til I restart the damn browser.
CNN loads something like 10 megabytes of resources when you open the front page. That's just code and images; all that code has to be parsed, JITed, built into the DOM, etc. and all of that requires exponential-ish (not scientific, but it feels right) more memory than the code itself. All those images have to be unzipped into pixel buffers and painted on screen.
Even assuming your browser could do all of these things right every time, look at how many goddamn standards the browser has to support; many of those features have to be loaded hot and ready to go to improve apparent performance, and those features require a nonzero memory overhead as well. So, in the end, in order for your browser to do anything useful it has to snort memory like a coke addict.
I suppose this could lead to more leaks, but it definitely reduces the page load time.
That being said, your point about web standards being a mess to support without tons of memory usage (and inevitably leaks) is on point.
I have no idea about Chrome, but in Firefox you can get a detailed breakdown of what's using RAM by typing "about:memory" into the URL-bar and hitting enter. Then click on the "Measure"-button to the left.
There's also a few buttons on that page to enforce a memory clean-up, so maybe you can try those instead of restarting Firefox next time, if you can't find a solution.
Usually, memory usage like that is caused by some faulty extension, so that's what you should look out for.
You could also try, if it doesn't happen anymore in a fresh profile: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
Actually, checking now -- having left one tab, with only this HN thread left open overnight (and computer closed) FF's memory usage has crawled back up to 2.88GB.
In "Explicit Allocations", 488MB of that are "heap-overhead". 455MB go to js-non-window" , of which 254MB are "zones" and 183MB "runtime". "window-objects" take 279MB, (the js-compartment for about:blank takes 151MB). Another 259MB for "heap-unclassified", and 155MB for "gfx".
In "Other measurements", there are 745MB of "decommitted", of which almost all is "js-non-window". "js-main-runtime" is 666MB, split evenly between "compartemnts" and "runtime" or "zones".
Nothing else is of much significance.
No extensions or plugins seems are explicitly noted in the memory breakdown. In my experience GC, CC, and Minimize Memory Usage make no difference. I do make use of Noscript and Privacy Badger, and I suppose I should try disabling them -- but my gut says disabling plugins that block scripts won't reduce JS memory usage.
Pretty much every time I've checked it really looks like oodles of JS-related memory leakage.
Anyway, not expecting a diagnosis here -- this isn't the appropriate forum for that. Just venting a bit. Thank you for your suggestions!
