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A lot of memory is used when multiple tabs are open

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by cor-el

halfawake
halfawake
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Is there anything that can be done about the insane memory usage in Firefox when multiple tabs are open? I often have 20+ tabs open and the amount of RAM that Firefox uses when I have it open with this many tabs is just ridiculous. As an example of this, I just restarted Firefox after checking the Windows Task Manager. The Task manager said that Firefox was using 1.2 GB of RAM. I did have 32 tabs open, but this seems excessive even for this many tabs. Some of the tabs were image heavy, but none of them had any video in them. I'd think 10 MB per tab of RAM would be plenty to cover these kinds of pages, maybe 20 MB at most. The upper end of that range would be 640 MB of RAM. Instead, it appears to be using an average of 40 MB of RAM per page when this many tabs are open.

Is there anything that can be done to reduce amount of memory being used when multiple tabs are open? It really shouldn't need this much RAM to serve this many pages.

Is there anything that can be done about the insane memory usage in Firefox when multiple tabs are open? I often have 20+ tabs open and the amount of RAM that Firefox uses when I have it open with this many tabs is just ridiculous. As an example of this, I just restarted Firefox after checking the Windows Task Manager. The Task manager said that Firefox was using 1.2 GB of RAM. I did have 32 tabs open, but this seems excessive even for this many tabs. Some of the tabs were image heavy, but none of them had any video in them. I'd think 10 MB per tab of RAM would be plenty to cover these kinds of pages, maybe 20 MB at most. The upper end of that range would be 640 MB of RAM. Instead, it appears to be using an average of 40 MB of RAM per page when this many tabs are open. Is there anything that can be done to reduce amount of memory being used when multiple tabs are open? It really shouldn't need this much RAM to serve this many pages.

All Replies (1)

cor-el
cor-el
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  • Top 10 Contributor
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Start Firefox in Safe Mode to check if one of the extensions (Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Extensions) or if hardware acceleration is causing the problem.

  • Switch to the DEFAULT theme: Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Appearance
  • Do NOT click the Reset button on the Safe Mode start window