Extremely High VRAM Usage
Hey Everyone, first post here,
So I love Firefox, it's my browser of choice, has been for about 2 years now. But I have been dealing with an issue this entire time and I cannot seem to solve it no matter what I do. I even bought a 3rd freaking GPU for my rig to dedicate to FireFox and still no luck (yes, the GPU is used for other stuff, but Firefox is it's only use when I am doing basic browsing).
All this comes down to VRAM usage. I commonly keep around 50-80 tabs open in Firefox. But it will eat up all my VRAM and them some on my GPU, and I have 8GB. I've caught it using 7GB of that, and probably more that was in the background shuffled into system RAM since VRAM was full (1GB was used for Windows for basic display tasks). And if I am watching a video, and then switch to a tab that hasn't been loaded in a while, the entire browser craps out and freezes for about 3-6 seconds before it stabilizes again. I'm pretty sure that the VRAM is being shuffled back from system RAM to VRAM for use.
Does anyone have any idea why the crap Firefox uses so much VRAM? I have tested this on multiple OS installs, multiple Firefox versions, 4 differnt computers, etc.... And they all have the same issue, high VRAM usage that ends up causing lag later down the road. This is really frustrating for me because it makes the browser completely unusable, and I don't want to stop using it because it's so much better than Chromium at literally everything else.
Oh and before you ask, yes I have tried uninstalling all plugins as well, still no luck (and the plugins across all 4 machines matched anyway when I was testing with plugins).
Alle svar (5)
Enter about:support. Go to the Graphics section.
What is in the Composing line? What card name is in the GPU1 section?
Third time typing this here, some reason everytime I try and post it shows access denied. Not sure what is going on.
So I am assuming you meant compositing not composing line yes? Well that says WebRender.
And the GPU name is the 1070, which is the GPU I want it to use.
To give some small background on my PC, it's pretty high end, have 128GB of RAM, a 1950X 16 core CPU, dual GTX 1080tis, and the 1070. To get Firefox to run on the 1070 (and this is what I do for Chrome, Vivaldi, other apps that I want it to use, and it works fine on those) I switch my main display (within Windows settings) to one connected to the 1070 before launching Firefox, then I switch back to my main display which is connected to the 1080tis. This forces Firefox to run/render on the 1070, freeing up my 1080tis for more FPS in games, especially when watching videos and the like.
As I said though, I have tested this with lots of configurations, including just single GPU setups, and still see this as an issue.
Something I did notice though, when launching it uses around 1GB of VRAM right off the bat, then it seems to slowly go up. Almost like it's some kind of VRAM leak, but not sure what would be causing that.
Try to enter about:config in the URL bar, search for the preference gfx.webrender.all and set it to false. Then restart the browser.
gfx.webrender.all is already set to false in there. However, gfx.webrender.all.qualified is set to true.
Any other ones I should look at, there are a lot of webrender options.
Just did and test and ran into something interesting. I swapped gfx.webrender.all.qualified off and the same issue happened. I started it, 1GB ish was used, then when I started clicking through all my pinned tabs the VRAM usage jumped up to 6.5GB.
However, I turned both gfx.webrender.all and gfx.webrender.all.qualified to true, restarted. And now it appears that it may be fixed. Swapped between all of the same tabs and so far VRAM is only at 3GB instead of 6.5 like before.