Arch Linux

egan

Member

From: Mountain View, CA

Registered: 2009-08-17

Posts: 273

Excessive Swappiness with Firefox 4?

It seems that using Firefox 4 causes my swap partition to be used excessively.

For instance, I am currently using 27% of my RAM (the bulk of that is Firefox). I open a new tab in Firefox and 0.24MB of swap gets used. I close the tab and it goes down to 0.20MB. The flash container is not running.

This seems strange and unnecessary to me...
I usually don't see swap unless my RAM usage is very high or I have a large amount of I/O.
Furthermore, I've never seen allocated swap disappear: normally even after the process is terminated the swap stays until I reset it.

Does anyone have any explanation of this?

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the sad clown

Member

From: 192.168.0.X

Registered: 2011-03-20

Posts: 837

Re: Excessive Swappiness with Firefox 4?

I just tried it out and could not reproduce your situation.  Youtube, Google Reader and several other tabs thrown in and nothing went to swap.  More information is probably needed, plugins you have in Firefox, installation method, etc.

And Firefox 4 is the only program that does this, and you did not notice this behavior with previous FF?

Last edited by the sad clown (2011-04-18 00:09:05)

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I laugh, yet the joke is on me

egan

Member

From: Mountain View, CA

Registered: 2009-08-17

Posts: 273

Re: Excessive Swappiness with Firefox 4?

My installation of Firefox 4 is straight from the repos. I have adblock, pentadactyl, and an American dictionary installed as addons. I never had the problem with previous versions of Firefox.

I only have 1GB of RAM but it's always been plenty for me. When I installed Firefox 4 I immediately noticed it used a dozen or so more megabytes of memory than Firefox 3.x on startup. Even without activity, sometimes Firefox 4's memory usage goes up spontaneously, a few kilobytes a minute.

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Hyugga

Member

From: Santiago, Chile

Registered: 2010-03-26

Posts: 335

Re: Excessive Swappiness with Firefox 4?

Try this:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ma … Swappiness
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox_Ramdisk

The first link is totally safe and some people say that you get a great performance boost doing it. I did the second but i didn't notice anything that great.

Good luck.