[oi-dev] Memory use with Firefox

[Gordon Ross]

Aren't those LWPs being shown?  (not processes)

On Thu, Jan 4, 2024 at 11:54 AM Gary Mills <gary_mills at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>
> I have a system that I mostly use for web brousing.  It has an AMD
> Ryzen 7 2700 Eight-Core Processor, and runs a recent version of OI,
> from 2023-11-07.  It has 48 gigs of memory with an 8-gig swap
> partition.  Using Firefox 119.0.1, I noticed that Firefox became
> sluggish only a few days after boot.  I have five permanent tabs in
> Firefox, along with several temporary tabs, using the "Open in new
> tab" option.  I assumed that ZFS and firefox were fighting over
> memory.  Indeed, the ZFS ARC was using 32 gigs of memory.  To fix this
> problem, I put the following into a file in /etc/system.d and
> rebooted:
>
>     set zfs:zfs_arc_max = 0x2E0000000
>
> This change limited the ARC to 12 gigs, and seems to have corrected
> the problem.  Firefox scrolling was quick and smooth, and continued to
> be so for the next two weeks.
>
> After the reboot, the swap space looked like this:
>
>     <mills at ryzen:2442>$ swap -sh
>     total: 940.79M allocated + 536.90M reserved = 1.44G used, 44.81G available
>
> After 14 days, it was like this:
>
>     <mills at ryzen:2761>$ swap -sh
>     total: 4.98G allocated + 2.00G reserved = 6.98G used, 25.91G available
>
> The free memory seems to have stabilized at about 26 gigs.  I assume
> that ZFS allocates memory from this free space.
>
> I still have questions about the memory usage of firefox.  Here's how
> memory size looked after 14 days:
>
>     <mills at ryzen:2762>$ prstat -c -s size
>     Please wait...
>        PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/NLWP
>       1598 mills    2850M 1481M sleep   49    0  26:56:22 0.7% firefox/198
>        941 mills    2558M 2532M sleep   59    0  27:14:03 0.2% Xorg/3
>       1978 mills     578M  272M sleep   59    0   0:03:10 0.0% firefox/25
>      18154 mills     569M  261M sleep   44    0   0:15:33 0.1% firefox/26
>       1868 mills     558M  254M sleep   59    0   0:14:22 0.0% firefox/28
>       1867 mills     414M  158M sleep   59    0   0:10:04 0.0% firefox/24
>       1601 mills     411M  151M sleep   59    0   0:01:01 0.0% firefox/24
>       1602 mills     384M  147M sleep   59    0   0:00:32 0.0% firefox/24
>       1866 mills     360M  124M sleep   59    0   0:09:19 0.0% firefox/24
>      18878 mills     340M  108M sleep   49    0   0:00:01 0.0% firefox/25
>      19646 mills     310M   68M sleep   49    0   0:00:00 0.0% firefox/12
>      19639 mills     310M   69M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% firefox/12
>      19642 mills     310M   68M sleep   49    0   0:00:00 0.0% firefox/12
>       1604 mills     227M   45M sleep   59    0   0:00:03 0.0% firefox/3
>       1600 mills     227M   44M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% firefox/4
>     Total: 133 processes, 1323 lwps, load averages: 0.22, 0.23, 0.21
>
> Why are there so many firefox processes?  I was expecting one process
> per tab.  Clearly there are many more.  Why do some of the processes
> have so many threads?  How much memory does firefox want?
>
>
> --
> -Gary Mills-            -refurb-                -Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-
>
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