To preface, I have had a thread about this previously,
https://kbin.social/m/firefox@lemmy.ml/t/840667/How-can-you-troubleshoot-a-crash-from-freezing
Ultimately, it didn't result in much.
Cue a few months, a lot has happened, and I have a new PC. Different graphics card vendor, different RAM, different motherboard vendor. Almost everything is different.
The crashes stopped, in fact I didn't notice them for a long time.
Past few days however, I noticed youtube videos starting to skip a bit. Thought it might just be youtube.
Then today happened. After about a month, I had a crash again. The PC has been left on for about a week (which is not really uncommon for me).
What I noticed that caught my eye...is that when i went to close it in task manager, it was using 14 GB. Just to be fair, I made sure before completing this post that I kicked every tab I had open out of inactive.
They are currently sitting at 5 GB.
What is occurring that is causing Firefox, under the same amount of active tabs (in fact possibly more, since I do have auto tab discard, so most of these tabs would not usually be active) to reach 3x the amount of ram they actually use?
I would like to get it to stop crashing, but it seems like even under a different hardware configuration, all I've done is make it take longer for it to actually happen, which makes me think even more that the it's an issue with memory.
Just remembered, FF has the built in memory manager, did you ever check the usage in there?
I did find that, is there a way to just leave it on and keep tracking? it seems like the reports only run at the time you decide to check them.
It'd be nice if there was a way for it to be on at the time of the crash. I found out in my previous attempts that the crash report does not actually seem to generate for this crash.
You don't need to wait till it crashes. Check the memory usage daily, see if the usage of anything is ballooning. If it takes a week to leak enough to eat all your RAM you'll see it happening in plenty of time.