Home / ubuntu / Questions / 1460651
Accepted
Joe
Asked: 2023-03-24 05:14:30 +0800 CST

Why is Firefox eating up swap on Ubuntu 22.04?

  • 772

I run typically 7 to 10 active tabs during the day.

I can see that starting from a low value, my swap space usage increases bit by bit all day, until eventually when it has got to about 1GB (out of a max 6GB), maybe over a day or two, system problems. Firefox is the only user application running.

There had been a similar issue on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, using the same configuration and daily tabs, but this seemed to be solved, so that swap usage was stable and low.

vm.swappiness is set to 10.

What has happened here?

22.04

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    On 18.04, watermark_boost_factor was disabled and you can check to see if it's disabled on 22.04 by running:

    cat /proc/sys/vm/watermark_boost_factor

    and it should say 0. If it is not zero, then run:

    echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/watermark_boost_factor

    and to make it permanent, edit /etc/sysctl.conf and make sure the following is set to vm.watermark_boost_factor=0

    Although the bug is technically fixed, you can read more information about the change here and here.

    The second link indicates that setting swappiness to 60 did not fix the issue but setting watermark_boost_factor to 0 along with swappiness at 60 did help although the swappiness setting may not be necessary if you're not using RAM intensive processes (they described +96% RAM in use).

    • 0