High memory usage

Step to reproduce: I opened Orion and Safari side by side and run speedometer 5 times, at the end Orion was using around 600mb of ram while Safari was using 200mb

Realised on a M1 MBA with 16gb of ram

emanuel Not able to reproduce. Please provide a video (side-by-side) og both browsers open and activity monitor

I haven't had any memory leaks or system slow-downs with Orion after disabling Bitwarden extension (Chrome version) even after multiple continuous days of use. I'll try switching to the FF version and see if it occurs again.

So bad I could barely do anything else, even force-quitting took 5 seconds.

lupus_balticus I am not sure if you realize that posting screenshots like this does not get us any closer to solving or even reproducing the problem

Vlad , ha, yeah, and I'm not complaining, love the browser and I pay for the search Just posting to confirm that it's not an isolated problem. Keep up the good work!

lupus_balticus Thanks. Screenshot alone does not make it a problem necessarly. Perhaps you loaded enough payload in the browser that would require it to allocate that much RAM etc.. Perhaps other browsers would do the same in similar circumstances. A single screenshot does not tell a significant story.

@Vlad

I have had this issue for a while. In fact I have made it a habit to restart Orion once a day to mitigate this.

I should have reported this ages ago but have been a bit busy - today I am running a very memory intensive process and saw Orion using 9GB of memory for ₂₀ tabs and thought I oughta dig in.

Here is a video (279MB) demonstrating the issue with Orion and Safari side-by-side, hosted on my iCloud Drive: https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/02c-S4hqJgglAT7CW7CbRpVAg#Screen_Recording_2022-08-30_at_13.56

Before recording, I did the following:

1. Open the same tabs in Orion and Safari - actual tabs I am working on today.
2. Quit both applications

During recording, I did the following:

1. Open both Orion and Safari, restoring the last window in Safari, so both browsers have the same tabs
2. Switch through all open tabs to load them into memory
3. Use iStat menus to get cumulative memory usage by both applications including child processes, intermittently opening it to show the memory usage
4. Repeatedly close and reopen the same 9 (arbitrarily chosen number) tabs in each browser to simulate having the browser open for a long browsing session that includes opening and closing many tabs.

Observations:

1. Memory usage between Safari and Orion is comparable at the start and after opening and loading all the tabs, as expected - around 3.5 to 4GB.
2. After repeatedly open and closing the same 9 tabs, Safari uses the same amount of memory as it did before this procedure, as expected - around 3.5GB.
3. After repeatedly open and closing the same 9 tabs, Orion uses substantially more memory than it did before this procedure, not as expected! Over 6GB. It does not ever decrease from that number until the parent process is quit.
4. Not recorded is further experimentation where I determined the amount of excess memory used by Orion increases proportionally to the number of tabs opened. In other words, the more tabs I open and then close, the more memory it uses. I just closed all tabs and reopened them and Orion is using about 9GB of memory.

Side-issue:

I don't think I captured this in the video, but both Orion and Safari, after opening the same tabs and then closing them so that only 1 tab is open for Safari or 2 pinned tabs for Orion, both use an embarrassingly large amount of memory.

When both start without any tabs, they use something on the order of 200MB each. But after opening a lot of tabs and then closing almost all, both Orion and Safari use more like 1.5 to 2GB of memory! I would expect the memory usage to drop down to the low hundreds of MB. So, clearly an upstream issue, not to be pursued here.

Orion 0.99.119-beta (WebKit 615.1.1)
macOS Version 12.5.1 (Build 21G83)
MacBookPro18,3

Session Info:

• Open windows => 2
• Pinned tabs => 2
• Active window tabs => 17
• Active tab url => https://orionfeedback.org/d/2627-orion-not-freeing-memory/29

Enabled Extensions:

Disabled Extensions:

• LibRedirect (firefox)
• SponsorBlock for YouTube - Skip Sponsorships (firefox)
• Reddit Enhancement Suite (firefox)
• uBlock Origin (firefox)
• Mate Translate – translator, dictionary (chrome)
• Dark Reader (firefox)
• MTG Quick Search (chrome)
• Bitwarden - Free Password Manager (firefox)

Non Default Settings:

• AutofillEnabled => 0
• PreferredBookmarkFolderId => 2
• NotificationsEnabled => 0
• ContentBlockerLastUpdated => 2022-08-12 00:00:00 +0000
• ShowBackgroundImageOnStartPage => 0
• isBackgroundImageDarkOnStartPage => 1
• overflowMenuItems => (
  )
• WebAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled => 1
• WebContinuousSpellCheckingEnabled => 1
• WebAutomaticQuoteSubstitutionEnabled => 0
• WebAutomaticDashSubstitutionEnabled => 0
• ShouldShowWelcomeAnimation => 0
• DownloadLocation => /Users/spencer/Downloads
• FirstLaunch => 0
• FirstTimeWebExtensionNotice => 1
• FocusMode => 0
• HyperlinkAuditingEnabled => 0
• LastUsedBuildVersion => 119
• PreCompiledContentRuleListVersion => 119
• LastCrashCheckDate => 2022-08-30 03:57:00 +0000
• NetworkPredictionEnabled => 0
• NextDownloadID => 184
• OpenNewTabsInForeground => 0
• SavedWindowSize => 1512.0,944.0
• SavedWindowPosition => -0.0,-0.0
• SendAdditionalDebugInformationWithCrashReports => 0
• BookmarksBarVisible => 0
• BookmarksSidebarVisible => 0
• BookmarksSidebarWidth => 215.5
• QuitWithConfirmation => 0
• CurrentToolbarSize => small
• ActiveLibraryTab => extensions
• ActivePreferenceTab => websites
• UndoTabClose => 0
• BookmarksLastSynced => 1661831820734.804
• ReadingListLastSynced => 1661831820735.415

Cannabat Thanks that is fantastic input, we will see what we can do

Facing the same issue today that closed tabs not getting flushed out.

Orion version: up-to-date
Mac OS: 12.5
No extensions installed (just a Plain vanilla Orion with default settings)
Tabs opened: Youtube, Reddit, LinkedIn

I tried to overload the memory by Opening bunch of productivity apps and Parallels VM and the memory pressure peaked to the high but the Orion Web Content (prewarmed) was not garbage-collected whereas Safari flushed them out.

I would be happy to provide if further information required to debug.

Vinay Please provide exact steps to reproduce and observed states in both browsers.

I have recorded a short video showing the closed browser tabs are held in memory after browser closed.

Vinay @Vlad I faced the same issue as yours.

I normally use these sites in my M1 mini.

1. Youtube.com
2. Gmail.com (work and personal)
3. ESPN.com
4. facebook.com
5. google searches (work related windows)

I closed all the 5 tabs (did not quit the Orion and still running in background) but RAM is still holding up with the closed tabs.

OS: MacOS Monterey 12.5
PC: Macbook M1 Air 8gb | 256gb
Orion: 0.99.119-beta (WebKit 615.1.1)

I tested it with Safari as well. I believe that Safari usually don't clear the unused memory until the RAM gets overloaded.

I love the Adblocking capabilities of Orion and thinking to shift my entire workflow to Orion from Safari.

and I wonder if this is the default behaviour of Orion?

Steps to reproduce:
<Include steps to reproduce the bug; Did you try using Compatibility mode? If applicable, does Safari behave in the same way?>
I have 5 tabs open in compatibility mode. With Chrome, RAM use was at about 1.5 gb. Safari was <1 gb.

Expected behavior:
I expected RAM use to be lower than Chrome.

Orion, OS version; hardware type:
Version 0.99.119-beta (WebKit 615.1.1)
MacOS 12.4 2020 M1 Macbook air, 8gb ram

Image/Video:

brokenheel Thank you for the report, just note that those are not 'steps to reproduce'