What's going on in task manager? One process is huge

[zorro6204]

I was checking something on task manager this morning (Win 10), and discovered there were five processes for Firefox running, even though I only had one window open. Firefox was consuming almost a gig of CPU memory, the vast majority of that in one process. I shut that down, and nothing happened to the window I had open, it appeared to be completely unaffected. After that memory use shrank to 240MB, although task manager still shows 4 processes running.

I have all options set to maximum privacy, no history, no cache, no bugger all. What in the heck is Firefox running in the background consuming more than a half gig of memory?

[DanRaisch]

Firefox runs multiple processes so if a web site causes one process to crash the rest of the processes can continue. See this article -- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc ... ss_Firefox

And 1GB is not a large amount of memory to see in use by some web sites, these days. They load videos, ads, etc, etc in addition to the basic content you are there for. Every bit of that display uses memory.

[therube]

> there were [multiple] processes for Firefox running

Expected.
FF is "multi-process" these days.

> Firefox was consuming

Browsers use memory.
All kinds of things factor in, probably most importantly the sites you happen to be visiting.

> I shut that down, and nothing happened to the window I had open, it appeared to be completely unaffected.

I'd say you got lucky.
I would have expected a crash out of that, but I guess it depends on just what that particular process was doing & how its termination might affect the browser overall.

> memory use shrank to 240MB

That's probably about as close to zero as you'll get - without closing FF.

> task manager still shows 4 processes running

Again, expected.

[zorro6204]

I was parked on Google, just left it open because I clear everything when Firefox shuts down and I didn't want to loose my logins on the sites I was looking at. Task manager shows it using 186MB right now, without that fifth process hog, whatever it was.

[DanRaisch]

without that fifth process hog, whatever it was.

That would depend on what site was open in the fifth window or tab.

[therube]

(Not that I fully understand, but) there is not necessarily going to be a 1 to 1 correlation between a FF process & a particular window.

IOW, different processes handle different aspects of FF (rather then "windows").

[zorro6204]

"That would depend on what site was open in the fifth window or tab"

Nothing, that's the point. Firefox was doing something big behind my back, and I don't like that.

[DanRaisch]

So you had just one window open with just the one tab displaying Google? Were there any dynamic displays on the Google page?

Or it could have been as simple as checking for updates or updating your Sync account (if you have one).

[zorro6204]

> So you had just one window open with just the one tab displaying Google?

Yup

> Were there any dynamic displays on the Google page?

Nope

It's happened a few times, all of sudden the CPU use balloons for no reason, and task manager reports there are five Firefox processes running. As far as I'm concerned there should only be one, I don't like my browser doing stuff out of sight, it might be evil.

[Frank Lion]

I don't like my browser doing stuff out of sight, it might be evil.

Well, just use another browser if it bothers you, but Google Search pages always do use large amounts of RAM on all of them.

[RobertJ]

.

I don't like my browser doing stuff out of sight, it might be evil.

.

[DanRaisch]

I don't like my browser doing stuff out of sight, it might be evil.

That's usually if you use that new browser called Lucifer.

[MarkRH]

You can look at about:memory and click the Measure button to see what's going on. Right now Twitch is using the most for me.

Web Content (pid 9752)
Explicit Allocations
1,176.26 MB (100.0%) -- explicit
├────833.59 MB (70.87%) ++ workers/workers(twitch.tv)/worker(blob:https://www.twitch.tv/65c9d206-19ae-4f7 ... 25d59b8908, 0x1b059000)
├────126.97 MB (10.79%) ++ window-objects/top(removed)//www.twitch.tv/burkeblack, id=70866960385)
...

If you look at the Processes Tab in Task Manager with the PID column you can match the PID of the about:memory report. You can click Minimize Memory Usage to clear some things out. I did that and that process went down to 350mb.