As a user with far too many FireFox open tabs, memory seems to disappear far too quickly. Knowing which of my many tabs contributes the most to the memory consumption would be helpful. But it seems as though Firefox doesn't make troubleshooting for that very easy. Here are a few tools which might help in narrowing my focus to determine granular memory consumption.
With recent versions of Firefox, there are some built-in tools which help to diagnose cpu and memory issues:
- about:performance - shows memory and cpu consumption
- about:memory?verbose - shows detailed memory consumption - not easily to digest
- about:cache?device=memory
Add-ons which provided in-tab memory consumption have been obsoleted. But one add-on which itemizes tabs: Tab Stats
Limiting the amount of RAM a program can use shows how on a Linux system to use cgroups to limit an application's memory footprint. The old 'ulimit' command is deprecated, and may not work.
Regarding the about:memory tool, more details can be found at Limit memory usage per Tab without blocking things? which points to about:memory and Memory.
Based upon How to Reduce Firefox Memory Usage using about:config it is possible to reduce memory caching with:
- 'about:config' in the address bar
- right click and create a 'new' -> 'integer'
- variable name is: browser.cache.memory.capacity (which is maximum RAM in KB) (further details at Browser.cache.memory.capacity) via About:config entries.