Memory leak may have been a misdiagnosis. The issue is clearly with Youtube, which is what most extensions I use are about, there is nothing obvious in the memory snapshot (not that it’d be easy to see, because video is a resource hog anyway) and the profiler seems to label the stutter with the very useful label of “jank”, so…
Someone more familiar with web dev than I am may be able to take the profiler logs and debug this, but a) that’s not me, and b) not my job.
Jank means that the renderer was delayed due to a resource conflict - usually because there’s something on the main thread that’s taking too long. Basically your issue is probably a CPU (or GPU) one, not a RAM one - It’s hard to help you out without knowing more about your environment, so all I can really give you is vague advice: if you’re using an adblocker other than uBlock Origin, switch to uBlock Origin, it has much better performance. Check the plugins and extensions and make sure there isn’t something you don’t recognise, if your computer was compromised at some point, cryptominer plugins can really tank performance.
Figured that much. I’m not a web developer, but I can read a profiler, and the CPU usage spikes before those gaps are a pretty good sign that this isn’t a memory leak. I use uBlock Origin, by the way, but there’s likely some weird interaction between it, other Youtube extensions and Youtube’s own attempts to nuke adblockers from orbit. And no, it’s not a cryptominer as far as I can tell. This looks like either a bug or an unintended behavior of the very popular, very sanctioned plugins running on Firefox (or Firefox itself).
Which is why, as I said, I have settled for periodic reboots. Convenience wins over principle often, but I happen to be stubborn.
Gotta say, though, I appreciate the attempts at troubleshooting, but the OSS and privacy communities in general have a tendency to respond to comments on poor performance, compatibility or UX with tech support, and I think it’s kinda missing the point.
The unfortunate thing is, most people aren’t having these kinds of performance issues. If a bug can’t be reproduced, it can’t be fixed. That makes these kinds of things pretty much impossible to fix until someone who is having the problem has the time/energy to dig into it, and the technical expertise to know what information and data to provide for a good bug report (which, honestly, is very rare), and then make themselves available for all of the inevitable follow-up questions and troubleshooting steps.
OSS devs are volunteers 99.9% of the time and they work on whatever they want to work on. A well written bug report with lots of context, a full memory snapshot, clear reproduction steps, expected/actual behaviour, full information on how to set up the environment from a fresh install, and so on, has a really good chance of being picked up by a developer. But if it’s even a little bit harder to just get to work on it, it’ll probably be ignored, because there are a hundred other more interesting issues to work on.
People can only help as much as they’re able to, we can’t fix your issue unless we know what it is, and usually the best place to start is by trying to make sure the surrounding environment is sane. If we went off assuming there was a Firefox bug and spent hours looking at a memory dump only to discover that your computer is a 2003 Intel Celeron or something, it would be a bit frustrating.
And yeah, most people just do not have the technical expertise to write a good bug report for a web browser - most devs are web developers or do business logic stuff - so it’s a tough nut to crack, and there’s not a huge number of people volunteering to help out open source software teams doing the soft skills stuff to coax useful information out of people who report issues :)
Hope that makes sense! OSS is very much a “be the change you want to see in the world” kind of place!
I’m actually having similar issues. Seemingly at random, my PC will freeze up due to lack of memory and killing Firefox fixes it. Im also sure it must be an extension causing it.
Here are my extensions, let me know which of these you are using and maybe we can narrow it down from that:
- Neat URL
- uBlock Origin
- Return YouTube Dislikes
- Firefox Multi-Account Containers
- SponsorBlock
- Vimium
- Decentraleyes
- Enhancer for YouTube
- Privacy Possum
- I don’t care about cookies
- First Party Isolation
- Startpage Privacy Protection
FWIW, the only ones we share on that list are uBlock, Dislikes and Enhancer.
Again, best guess is Youtube is desperately trying to poop out some ads and getting reinvented within an inch of its life by those extensions (not to mention dragged kicking and screaming into having pop-up playback windows) and something breaks in there somewhere. I’m not holding my breath for a fix anytime soon.
