Pale Moon using too much ram?

[Xemnius]

Currently running Linux Mint 17.3 and PM 26.1.1. I've had PM running for 9 hours and it's using 1.3GB of ram just for 3 tabs. I only have uBlock Origin installed and gstreamer enabled in the about:config. Any help regarding this issue would be very much appreciated. If you need more info, I'll be happy to elaborate. Thank you.

[ipsirc]

I had also notice incremental memory leaking with the default binary build. When i recompiled with --enable-jemalloc, this problem has gone. It's worth a try!

[Kunagi7]

Same here, just used palemoon 5 hours and with 1 tab (inoreader) opened it consumes 1.4gb, its 400 more mb than 25.8.1 under the same conditions.

[trava90]

Beginning with v26 the binaries released by us are using the system allocator instead of jemalloc. As a result, the memory usage will be some higher, but it also improves the performance of the browser. So far in all my testing I have not encountered any "runaway" amounts of memory being used, but will keep an eye on it.

[Xemnius]

Beginning with v26 the binaries released by us are using the system allocator instead of jemalloc. As a result, the memory usage will be some higher, but it also improves the performance of the browser. So far in all my testing I have not encountered any "runaway" amounts of memory being used, but will keep an eye on it.

Really? You're not experiencing any kind of leak? I currently only have 4 tabs open. Email, Spotify, Imgur and this forum. I've had Pale Moon running for 8 hours give or take and it starts with a reasonable amount of RAM usage and then it just sky rockets after a few hours. It's currently using a total of 2.3GB's of RAM, for only 4 tabs... If you need any more information regarding this issue I'll be more then happy to give it to you, because I would like to see this issue fixed sooner or later.

Thank you for your time.

[trava90]

I've had Pale Moon running for 8 hours give or take and it starts with a reasonable amount of RAM usage and then it just sky rockets after a few hours. It's currently using a total of 2.3GB's of RAM, for only 4 tabs...

I did a test on my wife's Mint 17.3 machine with Pale Moon 26.1.1. I'd been online for about three hours and had over 40 tabs open (Gmail, Imgur, several Youtube, a couple forums, blogs, etc). I left the browser and all tabs open overnight, then spent another hour or so online today and the memory usage never exceeded 1.7GB. I'll continue to investigate.

[Xemnius]

I did a test on my wife's Mint 17.3 machine with Pale Moon 26.1.1. I'd been online for about three hours and had over 40 tabs open (Gmail, Imgur, several Youtube, a couple forums, blogs, etc). I left the browser and all tabs open overnight, then spent another hour or so online today and the memory usage never exceeded 1.7GB. I'll continue to investigate.

Do you have any extensions running? I'm running uBlock Origin, Self-Destructing Cookies and a 3.7.1 Greasemonkey fork. I noticed that uBO alone added 100MB from the get go of loading the browser with no new tabs. So maybe there's something going on there? I don't know. You've got 40 tabs only using 1.7GB and I've got 4 that's using 1GB currently because I restarted my browser. That's wild.

Thanks for your reply.

[Moonchild]

It may be a good idea for you Linux folks to do a comparison run with different browser builds. That way we can get some information on if using the system allocator is problematic or not, if it's a global problem or distro specific, etc.

The browser's memory usage is, because of its design, rather atypical, and it's very well possible that the system allocator of some installations doesn't like it and won't release memory properly (although it should). Like with all use of system libraries, there's an inherent risk that mixing code origins causes problems. I'd prefer to keep using the system allocator, since it's faster, but if it causes too much memory use, then switching back to the known-good (and recently improved) in-tree allocator is the best course of action (and leaving other allocator use to contributed builds or distro-specific rebuilds for distros that have an allocator in use that Pale Moon plays well with).

[trava90]

Do you have any extensions running?

The only extensions my wife has installed are Adblock Latitude, Blue Moon Linux, DownTheMall!, Encrypted Web, History Submenus II, Noscript, Pale Moon Commander, Private Tab & Stylish.

I'm going to send you a new build of 26.1.1 later today that uses the improved in-tree allocator as mentioned by Moonchild above. If you could test that build and report back that would be great!

[Moonraker]

Not sure if this would be relevant or not.Would it be correct to say that PM runs its cache in ram.?.I know that with firefox there were some about:config tweaks which would make ff run its cache in ram instead of by disk.
Maybe this may account for some excess ram usage.

[trava90]

Pale Moon can be configured to use a RAM cache, but doesn't do it by default.

[Agent Orange]

More data for the pool:

Experiencing this on PM 26.1.1, Mint 17.3. Pale Moon gradually uses more and more RAM. After ~1hour of browsing, the main thread (not counting plugins) was using 937MB of RAM.

Only add-ons are ABL 3.5.0b1, Encrypted Web 5.1.2, and Greasemonkey 3.7.

[trava90]

Pale Moon 26.2 will be using the jemalloc memory allocator instead of the system allocator. That should resolve the increasing memory usage.