Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net writes:
On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 2:22 AM, Jean-Luc Aufranc cnxsoft@cnx-software.com wrote:
(I'm currently sitting on 16Gb box with constant 100% cpu load - it's Firefox collecting garbage in its 6Gb javascript heap - forever and ever).
I'm glad I'm not the only one suffering from this...
... you're not - it's a known design flaw in web browser design: a global process running all tabs/windows in order to reflect a global javascript execution context. chrome fixed the design flaw by running entirely separate processes per window, which brings its own set of problems.
i run over 100 tabs on a regular basis, so every now and then i end up with 100% cpu usage and occasionally well over 45 gb of virtual memory gets allocated. solution: kill firefox and restart it, allowing it to reopen all tabs. recent versions leave the tabs "unopened" until you *actually* open them by explicitly clicking on them.
As a user of pentadactyl this procedure is particularly simple
:restart<return>
I only mention this because I have a feeling that pentadactyl might be something that some of the folk here would like but may not have heard of -- it makes Firefox/Iceweasel behave like vi -- it sounds mad, but many people find it instantly addictive.
The only real downside is that it's often a bit behind the latest Firefox release, so doesn't yet work with 42, but if you're OK with packaged versions, Debian's currently got 38.2.1esr available in everything since oldstable (wheezy), and that works with the current version ... which is packaged for testing (a.k.a. "stretch") as xul-ext-pentadactyl
Cheers, Phil.