Linux OS question

[tomdkat]

Hi! So, on a pretty old Lenovo laptop I run Linux Mint 18.3. On Mint 18.3, I run Firefox 88. I view YouTube videos in Firefox about 98% of the time. Anyway, I've noticed something weird. I'll watch various YouTube videos for several hours and over time, Firefox will start running more slowly and YouTube will basically "misbehave" (e.g. take a LONG time to navigate back to the home page, take a LONG time to respond to mouse clicks, yadda-yadda). I'll look at the resource monitor and I'll see 5MB of swap is used and most of the 8GB of RAM is used. So, I'll close Firefox and will open it again. After doing this, some videos will load normally but then the performance issues will come right back and I'll get messages indicating "this page is slowing down Firefox", and so on. Cool.

So, then I'll exit Firefox, verify no Firefox or "WebContainer" processes are running and I'll logout of the system. I'll log back in and open Firefox. I'll be able to watch a few videos and then the performance issues come back again. The only way to really "fix" the performance issues is to exit Firefox and restart the whole system. Once I reboot, Firefox performance is nice and snappy.

I know Mint 18.3 is old and out of support. I know Firefox 88 is old and out of support. My question is: why would a reboot fix an issue that closing Firefox and logging out, at the very least, should fix? During one of the "logout and login back in" tests, I noticed 5MB of swap was still being used and RAM usage was closer to 1.5GB or 2GB of the 8GB of RAM installed.

Somehow, I was under the impression by logging out and logging back in again (not rebooting), that *should* free up resources and clear out any "errant" processes almost as if I rebooted the system.

Any ideas on why logging out and logging back in wouldn't "work", in this case?

Thanks in advance!

[tomdkat]

Nevermind. I think it's an issue with YouTube and Firefox 88. Today, I experienced similar behavior and RAM use was well below 8GB of RAM and no swap was used at all.