Memory Management Tips?

Here's what my system looks like with just Firefox open on Mint 13:



Swap performance isn't terrible since I have an SSD, but it's noticeably slow nonetheless - there's a half-second delay when I try to scroll or switch tabs.

After digging around a bit, I found the problematic tab, rebooted, and started Firefox with only that tab open. Here's what memory usage looks like with just 1 open tab and no other programs running except System Monitor:



The webpage itself is only 55 MB at most, yet Firefox has used up virtually all of my RAM...

 

Peon have you tried any of the tips here: Firefox uses too many CPU resources - How to fix | Firefox Help ? I am on FF 15.0.1 and use ad block + and never use more than 50 % of my memory (but I do not have flash enabled due to heating issues). If you want to share the offending tab (site?) PM me.

 

Switch to chrome lol. I loved firebox but finally switched after reading a lot of reviews and wow. Way faster browsing and way less problems. I didn't even know the web browser could make pages load faster lol

 

Firefox under Linux has become a terrible CPU hog in the last 1 - 2 yrs. Many in the Linux community have switched to Chromium because of this.

And as far as the charts show - I can see that your CPU usage has gone down in the second chart (guessing because you fixed the problematic tab).

In Linux at least - as long as you have a low CPU load and you dont swap to disk often - your performance should be good. Swap on an SSD should give really good performance, but at the same time would reduce your life of the SSD a bit if you're concerned.

I'm kind of curious why do you have close to 2GB of RAM utilized. I have an age-old Core 2 Duo laptop running openSUSE 12.2 with gnome-shell and I see around 1.2GB of 2GB being utilized.

Also try using htop - which shows the numbers much better and clearly (although no graphs).

 

If I could get replacements for all of my extensions, I'd switch in a heartbeat

The difference in CPU usage between the 2 charts is because a Flash video is playing in the first chart. As for the RAM usage - well, that's kinda the main concern of this thread...

 

Yes that is why I suggested htop. You can even sort processes by highest memory usage... Without any info about the running processes, there is not much we can infer....

 

Exactly, post a screenshot of System Monitor in the Processes tab sorted by Memory. Or install htop and it will automatically sort by % memory usage.

 

Here's the Processes tab:

 

Looks like flash is eating memory, plugin-container.