Many open windows make Firefox scroll **very** slowly

[Kevin Martin]

On 11/05/2013 09:02 AM, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> As I open more windows or tabs in Firefox it becomes slower and slower, finally unusable.  It can take as long as 20 seconds to
> scroll the screen, which tends to scroll in large jumps, even when smooth scroll is enabled.  The problem is worse when smooth
> scrolling is enabled, but is bad enough even when it is not.  Other applications seem to have scrolling slowed somewhat when Firefox
> has many windows open.  The problem seems to be related to flash, since when I kill xulrunner/flash, graphics performance gets
> better, but still does not always become acceptable.  Swapping between Firefox windows and tabs is normal.
> 
> It looks to me like a memory swapping issue, but I have no evidence beyond my gut.
> 
> Right now Firefox has 30 tabs open on all its windows.  Performance is bad, though not intolerable.
> 
> The system is:
> 
>     4 processor x86_64 system
>     Fedora-19 with all updates installed,
>     Firefox-25.0,
>     Nvidia GeForce 8400GS with the proprietary driver.
> 
> 
> Any ideas what's going on, or how to investigate?
> 
> 
> 
FWIW, firefox looks like it has a memory leak.  With something just over 50 tabs open, my firefox was using 1.4G RAM and rising (was
watching it go up using top).  After stopping and restarting it (with the same just over 50 tabs) it's using about 400Mb RAM and
holding stable.  But in a day or so I'll look again and see that it's eating RAM for all it's worth...there's even a comment on the
mozilla website about this:  "Firefox's memory usage may increase if it's left open for long periods of time. A workaround for this
is to periodically restart Firefox. You can configure Firefox to save your tabs and windows so that when you start it again, you can
start where you left off. See Restore previous session - Configure when Firefox shows your most recent tabs and windows for details.
".  This comment can be found at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-ram.  So every now and again a
restart of firefox is necessary it appears.  Wish they would do something about this.

Kevin