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Gmail "Fails to connect" in a tab in Firefox & will not reconnect.

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Many times, I will have my Gmail open in a tab in Firefox and suddenly Gmail fails to connect. I cannot refresh it, it will not reconnect. But if I close the tab, open a new tab and reload Gmail, it works fine. For a while. This happens every day. Another issue. Firefox is eating up all my memory and resources. When I open the Windows Task Manager and look at processes that are running, many times there will be as many as 50 occurrences of firefox.exe open and running. Right now, I have 3 different Firefox windows open, one has 1 Tab, a second window has 2 Tabs open and the third firefox window has 8 tabs open. In Task manager there are 29 occurrences of firefox.exe running, using up over 3.5 GB of ram. Why? Using this much memory slows down the entire system.

Many times, I will have my Gmail open in a tab in Firefox and suddenly Gmail fails to connect. I cannot refresh it, it will not reconnect. But if I close the tab, open a new tab and reload Gmail, it works fine. For a while. This happens every day. Another issue. Firefox is eating up all my memory and resources. When I open the Windows Task Manager and look at processes that are running, many times there will be as many as 50 occurrences of firefox.exe open and running. Right now, I have 3 different Firefox windows open, one has 1 Tab, a second window has 2 Tabs open and the third firefox window has 8 tabs open. In Task manager there are 29 occurrences of firefox.exe running, using up over 3.5 GB of ram. Why? Using this much memory slows down the entire system.

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It is quite normal to see more Firefox processes running.

  • process for the main Firefox thread (user interface)
  • one or more content processes
    you see more content processes when Fission is enabled
  • process for the compositor thread
  • process for extensions
  • process for WebRender when this feature is enabled

There are several toolkit.aboutProcesses prefs on the about:config page to show more info. You can find the current multi-process state on the Troubleshooting Information page (about:support).

  • "Help -> Troubleshooting Information"
    "Application Basics":<be>Multiprocess Windows and Fission Windows
    "Remote Processes" (Web Content)

See the about:memory and about:processes pages for info about all processes. See the about:unloads page for info about the tabs.