I can't replicate the issues you're detailing - this seems very odd to me (and I'm speaking on the level of testing on multiple machines. This likely may be something particular with your setup.
Here are a few things that can contribute to poorer performance on a machine:
- Clean Install v Multiple Upgrades: I had a similar issue on a workstation that had been upgraded through the years from 5.10 to 9.04 the desktop would randomly restart at odd intervals with no warning - and no log entries. I ended up doing a clean install and the issue went away. Not the best scenario where Troubleshooting triumphed but an example of how older configurations can cause weird issues.
- Hardware: Far less likely - but it may just be an issue with that Firefox release and your setup (drivers, configuration, etc) might be conflicting - which would explain why Swiftfox (a Firefox derivative aimed at increasing performance of the Mozilla tool for Linux) is also responding poorly.
I would search for people exhibiting similar issues with Firefox on setups similar to yours ( You didn't provide anything so I can't really help you further ) but it may be a configuration, compilation issue.
Try to make it happen, then post output of free -m
.
Also, please post details on what make and model of hard drive you're using, and output of df -h
.
For reference, here is me looking at the %memory used by the biggest processes currently running on my system:
me@banshee:~$ ps wwaux | awk '{print $4 " " $11};' | sort -rn | head -n 10
8.1 rhythmbox
7.1 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
3.7 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
3.3 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
2.6 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
2.5 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
2.3 /usr/bin/X
2.3 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
1.9 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
1.9 compiz
Can you run the same command on your system, please, and let's see what your biggest processes are?
For reference, my system has 16G of RAM, and each of those chrome processes you see is therefore eating something along the lines of 300MB-600MB of RAM. So, yeah, they definitely do add up.
For further reference: those are my TOP memory-hungry Chrome processes; I actually have 72 current tabs open right now and they're eating about 0.9% of my RAM (about 90MB-ish) apiece on average - the actual range is from about 10MB on the low end to about 600MB on the high end. I haven't tried to check to see how much omgubuntu eats specifically.
A bit MORE reference: I set up a clean VM and installed chromium-browser; opening 12 tabs to http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ resulted in 1.3G used / 718M free (646M used / 1.3G free -/+ buffers/cache). So, basically, either something OTHER than Chromium is eating most of your RAM, or you have extensions installed in Chromium that aren't very memory-efficient and are significantly bloating it per process... if I had to guess, I'd say probably the latter. What extensions are you running?
Best Answer
As suggested by @Avi disabling the GPU solved this issue in my case.
I proceeded as suggested in this bug report and disabled the use of gpu for my chrome. For such, you just need to start it with the
--disable-gpu
flag.You can also do as shown in this issue, by changing the settings. For this go at
chrome://settings/
>Advanced
and uncheckUse hardware acceleration
.As you can see, this seems to be an issue and both ways are just workarounds. Let's hope future versions fix this issue and this question/solution becomes obsolete.