I can finally use FireFox again! overload was all about the performance settings

[pastywhitegurl]

Maybe this little discovery will help someone.

Its been 2 years since I moved away from FireFox.  I  just couldn't figure out why it kept maxing out my CPU and memory and crashing.  Disabling all my many addons had no effect.  I tried all the remedies I could find to no avail and eventually gave up. 

So about a week ago, I started having slow loading issues with Palemoon.  Palemoon has always crashed occasionally for no apparent reason, but the slow page loading is a new thing.  Its generally been lean and mean in that area.  So recently it was sometimes taking 2 minutes to load a page, and then even after the content appeared, the page kept loading.   

Frustration level got too high a couple days ago, so I fired up FireFox again just to see where it was at, and sure enough....it ran for a short time and then started overloading my resources.  I found an obscure reddit post that mentioned the performance settings and how they should be related to the capacity of your RAM and your processor set up.    The performance settings are set to 8 processes by default.  The poster mentioned that you should limit the number to match how many cores your machine has if your RAM is less than 8gigs.   Well, mine is 4GB and I have a dual core processor, so I changed my content process limit to 2 and  removed limits on the memory handling. I had apparently set those to a finite number in past efforts to fix the overloading issues.

The effect was immediate.  From running at 1200MB memory or more, it dropped to about 500-600MB.  That's still twice what Palemoon runs at, but it seems an acceptable level for my machine.   All of a sudden, I could browse again with normal page load times.  Pale moon is still misbehaving, but I'll leave that for another discussion.

You can find the FireFox performance settings on the general page of your tools > options menu.  You have to uncheck the default box to see the options.

[plodr]

performance settings and how they should be related to the capacity of your RAM and your processor set up.

Both FF ESR and PM are horrid so I'm going to be investigating. Thanks. Now to see if I can find performance settings.
I have a single core CPU and 4 GB of RAM.

[pastywhitegurl]

I hope you find some joy.   It is so frustrating to be paying for high speed internet and have to wait forever for pages to load.  Maddening, really.