Firefox unresponsive for a few minutes after suspend to disk

[spectromas]

This seems to happen when firefox-bin has been running for a long time, if I suspend to disk and then resume firefox will freeze for a few minutes. If I open htop I can see the the swap decreasing and firefox's ram figures increase. It also doesn't happen every time, it only tends to happen if firefox is showing a large amount of virtual ram, this morning it was showing 20gb. I'm not really sure how this impacts things but it's the only common factor that I have noted.

 

Are there any kernel options which could be making a difference here? Grepping my config I only see these with swap in the name:

 

CONFIG_SWAP=y
CONFIG_ARCH_USE_BUILTIN_BSWAP=y
CONFIG_FRONTSWAP=y
CONFIG_ZSWAP=y
 

I am using gentoo-sources 4.1.1-r1 and firefox-bin-38.0.1-r1.

 

I'm having problem attaching things to this forum so here is my kernel config in case there is anything in there that might be revealing - http://sprunge.us/RSWJ

[uudruid74]

Firefox has an obvious memory leak.  I think its had a leak since Netscape Navigator and no one seems to want to fix it.  20GB is absolutely ludicrous!  Mine is at 14GB (I only have 8GB of actual RAM).  I have less than a dozen tabs open.  All the images and html on all those pages PLUS all the over head to load in the regular expression virtual machine, the javascript virtual machine, and all the node tree overhead shouldn't be THAT much.   I don't think any Java is on any of these pages, so that VM shouldn't be eating RAM, although thats another one that eats RAM like its nothing.

 

The kernel isn't at fault.  And are you actually using ZSWAP compressed memory?   I don't know if it would make it faster in this case (possibly), but you have to set it up in userspace too, not just in the kernel, and then its 1 zram device per CPU core due to how its designed (prevents contention).

[spectromas]

I'm not sure I fully understand virtual memory but firefox is the only program I use that has figures like this, it does seem excessive.

 

I'm trying vanilla-sources right now and didn't have the problem when I resumed this morning but the difficulty is that it doesn't always happen so it makes the issue a slow one to test. I haven't done anything to set up ZSWAP in userspace, it's one parameter I've never been completely clear on what it does exactly.

[uudruid74]

Firefox will continue to use more and more RAM as you use it. I just set it to open all current tabs on restart and then I can close it and restart it to reclaim RAM. Close firefox before letting your system suspend and it wont take so much time to resume. It will be faster to reopen it after suspend.

 

ZRAM compresses RAM that is 'swapped out', basically it compresses it instead of swapping it by giving you a /dev/zramX set of devices to swap to. Unless you are using a cell phone (swapping to flash ia a horrible idea) then you can disregard zram.