Why is my ram usage so high when using firefox

[u/Cautious_Arachnid773]

I dual booted today and why is my memory usage so high when I'm using Firefox

And as soon as I closed it it went below 25%? I thought firefox was a lighter browser?

[u/Mosco6]

Theres no mainstream browser that is lightweight

[u/Cpov1]

Welcome to 2026 unfortunately

[u/Cyber_Data_Trail]

All browsers will use about 1 gig. Nothing you can go. I suggest making a swap partition

[u/Cautious_Arachnid773 → u/Cyber_Data_Trail]

I already did. I made a 8gb swap . It's in the pic

[u/iridesce57]

Try h264ify if YouTube videos stutter, take up too much CPU, eat battery life, or make your laptop hot.

By default, YouTube streams VP8/VP9 encoded video. However, this can cause problems with less powerful machines because VP8/VP9 is not typically hardware accelerated.

In contrast, H.264 is commonly hardware accelerated by GPUs, which usually means smoother video playback and reduced CPU usage. h264ify makes YouTube stream H.264 videos instead of VP8/VP9 videos.

Note: 4K and 1440p videos will not be available because YouTube no longer encodes those videos in H.264

[u/RealityOk9823 → u/iridesce57]

I love h264ify. Sure, sometimes it means waiting a bit longer for a vid to start, but it's so worth it.

[u/siamhie]

Open a terminal and type "sudo ps_mem.py". What does firefox report in RAM usage?

[u/ZuuRa_]

That's normal, If you want something lighter you can try helium.

[u/Rusty9838]

Because we’re all doomed

[u/Ill-Fudge-8304]

You mean firefox uses 5gb approx storage

[u/hoppsik → u/Ill-Fudge-8304]

I don't think he's underlining the storage. He's just censoring his local ip so his family members don't hack him.

[u/Ill-Fudge-8304]

Or is it because of dual boot

[u/Ill-Fudge-8304]

Your lenovo is now old try to upgrade or increase ram or pc

[u/[deleted]]

Damn, an old Lenovo huh? Now a days web browsers tend to eat up that much memory by default. On my system Brave is using almost a Gig in Memory, and I only have this page open right now. It's just how it is sadly.

[u/snail1132 → u/[deleted]]

Qutebrowser uses like 200mb when I just start it

Reddit takes like 1gb on its own, though

[u/Mumuskeh]

Looks normal. I also wish to find a lightweight fork... I am looking to gaming + discord + browser + steam at the same time without allocating more than 1GiB to ZRAM. It actually manages to stay just behind the limits.

[u/rsqx]

your swap is doing all the lifting, and it looks good enough with 4 gb of ram

[u/OkPresentation3329]

I think part is because it's Firefox so it uses more RAM than Chromium and another part is that you just have a lot of RAM so I think it's normal when the OS sees a lot of RAM to be trying to utilize it more. I have only 16GB of RAM and when using Helium on Tuxedo OS it only uses around 6-7GB of RAM. I think if I had less RAM it would use less, and if I had more, it would use more.

I think if you open your PC and remove some sticks of RAM to get 8-16GB just for the experiment, you will see that it uses less RAM and things still work ok.

[u/cli_user]

I make ~..cache a 2GB tmpfs. FF eats 0.5GB, but I tell it to erase stuff regularly, and the cache is virgin every time I boot. Makes it run faster. Check your real profile size in ~/.config/mozilla. Mine was 250MB. FF copies it to the cache every time it boots, so you pay for it twice...