The issue is that browsers don't release much memory back to the system when it's needed. I wish they'd work more like the Linux kernel's VFS caching later, but they don't (and might not be able to. For example, I do don't think the Linux kernel has good APIs for such a use case).

[–] bassomitron 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

It does release it back to the system. It only doesn't if you actively have a ton of windows/tabs open, in my experience. Even then, it'll cache stuff to disk after awhile. Like on my phone, I've easily had over 20 tabs open in Firefox (Android) and it doesn't suck up all of my phone's ram (which only has 12GB). If your system is running less than 16GB, then that's another matter and you really should add more, as 16GB is pretty much the baseline on computers these days.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Mine is 32GB and Firefox as consistently and repeatedly refused to release the excess RAM back into the pool. So it doesn't work out as well in practice as it does on paper. I would agree that 16GB is the bare minimum though and if you have less you absolutely should get more if you can. Firefox needs at least 8GB to run smoothly, but a system that only has that amount or less will be bogged down by Firefox alone.

[–] AdrianTheFrog 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm on 4gb of ram right now (travelling so I'm away from my desktop) and firefox is using ~2gb I think (only 4-6 tabs open though)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I guess with a small amount of tabs it can work better, but with 400 tabs and 12 extensions it definitely does struggle. When I first used the .desktop files to limit the ram I accidently set it at 1GB and everything started lagging and freezing in Firefox, it really didn't like it. At least I learned that the RAM limiting method I found really did work because of that.

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