40

FYI I still see high memory usage over time. In this case I had Orion open since ~ Sunday and after finally working through all my windows and tabs, Orion's Memory Used was still 3GB -- with about 2 GB App Memory and 800 MB Compressed.

Here's a snapshot from Activity Monitor with Orion still running but all windows closed:

After I closed Orion, Memory Used went down to 5.57 GB, App Memory down to 2.13 GB, and Compresssed to 855 MB. I also saved a Sample of the Orion process in case that is helpful to share.

While the above summary does not provide quickly reproducible steps, the issue is not intermittent. It does happen to me every time I keep Orion open for a long time. My typical session is ~ dozen windows and ~ 20-something tabs, which I don't think is a lot relative to many other people. I do open and close a lot of windows throughout the day though. If there are additional things to capture next time this happens please let me know.

The usability issue around this is that as Orion's memory usage grows, it's working memory gets pushed into Compressed. Once that happens, Orion feels sluggish until it is restarted. Every "New Window" or "Open Location" is a slight hesitation relative to the snappiness of a fresh session.

Ideally Orion's memory usage after all windows/tabs are closed from a long session would be the same as if it is when it is opened fresh (with no windows/tabs open). I state this as a goal in the sense that its memory usage would be the same during a long session as the equivalent fresh session restoring the previous session (i.e. presumably the minimum for that set of windows/tabs).

I bet Orion snappiness would also be better over long sessions if Orion, or at least its main UI/UX and networking processes and the process for the foreground tab, never spilled into Compressed memory and were last to be swapped to disk out of all its processes. Almost like OS kernels never used to get paged to disk.

Version 0.99.128.2.1-beta (WebKit 619.1.11.111.2) Build date Aug 3 2024 MacBook Air (macOS Catalina 10.15.7 build 19H2026)

Catalina (10.15)

  • Vlad replied to this.
    Merged 1 post from High memory usage over time.

      bzgnyc Do you have steps to reproduce this from a new clean orion profile?

          5 days later

          Vlad That's what I was trying to say -- it is reproducible in that it always ends up that way but it happens over extended sessions so I don't have a concise set of steps to reproduce.

          Almost the opposite in that if I have Orion set to save my session and reopen the same on startup, the restarted Orion uses a lot less memory than what Orion was using just prior to quit with the same windows. As you can see in the snapshot, there were 0 windows/tabs open but still 13 processes and 3GB of RAM being used after I closed all tabs/windows after an extended session before I quit. A fresh Orion session starts out at 150MB.

          I realize that doesn't give you a lot to go on which I was asking for additional things I can capture when this happens. Or additional options I can give Orion before starting an extended working session so that I can give you more debugging info once it does happen.

          • Vlad replied to this.

              bzgnyc I appreciate the description and yes it does not leave us much to work with. In a situation where we have over 2000 well defined issues, chasing a ghost is not a good use of our limited time. Hoping for reproducible steps.

                  Vlad Okay I admit I didn't know there are 2000 other issues out there... If you have suggestions on how an end-user can track down issues like this much appreciated. I am happy to do the legwork.

                  By the way the good news is that most of the easily reproducible crashing bugs in Orion have been squashed. The bad news is that leaves intermittent ones with no obvious sequences to reproduce...

                  Side note: I had two crashes in Orion recently -- both SEGV and I assume from null pointer dereferencing as the crash report included a message along the lines of "KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000110". However the crashes appeared to be in the WebKit thread (both times under WKImmediateActionController immediateActionRecognizerWillPrepare). I assume that normally crashes in WebKit are best reported directly to that project though does that still hold for the Mojave/Catalina builds?

                  • Vlad replied to this.

                      bzgnyc

                      Okay I admit I didn't know there are 2000 other issues out there...

                      There are 2786 issues open at this moment to be exact! Good news is we squashed 3289 issues so far!

                      If you have suggestions on how an end-user can track down issues like this much appreciated.

                      The details of what we need to fix this are explained in this post:

                      https://orionfeedback.org/d/4480-check-memory-usage/54

                          10 days later

                          Orion eats up 10 Gb of Ram with 14 tabs, 4 of them only images.

                          I have Upwork and github open up.

                          Safari wouldn't use that much memory on my mac.

                          Expected:
                          Only a few RAM should be used by Orion.

                          Version 0.99.128.2.1-beta (WebKit 619.1.11.111.2)

                          Sequoia (15)

                            Merged 2 posts from Orion eats too much RAM.

                              It has to do with Orion letting the sites still run in the background while on another tab. Other browsers have the option to disable that.

                              The websites I surfed on usually consists of those with a live chat as upwork and sites running on React (Next.js)

                              • Vlad replied to this.

                                Vlad Other than the one memory runaway example that I provided that was Mojave-specific (also reproducible under Catalina but for some reason at a much lower level), I agree there is a gap. I understand that you need a concise set of steps to reproduce so that you can investigate and fix. We don't have that. However please understand that many users consistently experience high memory usage when Orion is left running for a while but we're not sure the exact steps that lead up to that situation as it typically takes place over a several days.

                                However, as my screen capture shows there is a leak and what appear to be multiple zombie processes. I had no windows/tabs open at that moment in the session and yet there were still 13 Web Content processes and Orion's main process was using 3GB of memory.

                                What we need -- what I was looking for -- is some advice or additional tools to bridge the gap. As I noted I'm happy to do the legwork but it's unclear to me (and it appears for others as well) how to approach this problem when things start out great but slowly blow up after 2-3 days of browsing.

                                Perhaps what we need to do is regroup on this. Like all the diagnostic tools most OS accumulate as they mature perhaps more tools are needed in Orion for end-users to help isolate issues like this for reporting. I will work on some ideas and post in Suggestions this weekend.

                                P.S.When you said there were 3K issues I believed you. Just surprised because previously I never would have guessed that amount from previous browsing of the Roadmap. Plus I just don't experience that many issues on a day-to-day basis. Yes I experience several Mojave-specific issues and this amorphous problem but it really doesn't feel like a browser with 3K open issues...

                                    bzgnyc I had those problems since launching Orion without browsing for 2-3 days.

                                        Xytronix Your issues may be different than mine and yours more easily reproduced. Can you share more details? For example if you open those 14 tabs one at a time, how much memory does each site take? Are there one or two that dominate? For those that seem high, can you show memory usage with just that site open in each of Safari and Orion side-by-side?

                                            bzgnyc You have a point we will see if we can come up with instructions/tips to better hunt this down. We agree that there is likely an issue and are keen to get this sorted out.

                                                10 days later

                                                Subject: High RAM Usage Issue with Orion Browser Installation

                                                Dear Orion Support Team,

                                                I am reaching out to report an unusual issue with RAM usage in the Orion browser, which I recently installed on my device.

                                                Despite having only one extension active—Ghostery, installed via the Chrome Web Store and taking up around 300 MB of storage—the browser displays a progressively increasing RAM consumption. With no webpages open, Orion initially starts at approximately 500 MB of RAM but then gradually rises. Within two minutes, the usage reaches around 4 GB, and at times it has escalated to 9, 10, or even 11 GB with only one or two pages open.

                                                This behavior seems abnormal, particularly for a fresh installation. I have attempted various solutions, but the issue persists. Could you please provide any guidance on addressing this situation? Additionally, I would appreciate knowing if this is a known problem or if there may be specific compatibility issues on my system.

                                                Thank you for your attention and any support you can provide.

                                                Best regards,
                                                Matteo

                                                I would also like to mention that I expected Orion to perform as advertised, particularly in terms of efficiency. Currently, however, it is the least RAM-efficient browser I have encountered. I had hoped it would fulfill its promise of being extremely resource-efficient, but as it stands, it falls far short in this regard. I even tried reinstalling and adjusting settings, but the problem remains unresolved.

                                                Orion v129

                                                Sequoia (15)

                                                • Vlad replied to this.

                                                  Are you able to reproduce this issue on a fresh Orion profile (File -> Profiles -> New Profile...) without installing Ghostery? This would help us figure out whether this is an issue with Orion or with Ghostery.

                                                  I tested a fresh Orion profile with Ghostery enabled and I was not able to get my memory usage to balloon as was described in the report.

                                                    Merged 2 posts from Extremly large ram usage on Mac .

                                                      pit104s Orion has minimal memory footprint out of the box. The moment you install a first extension you may be introducing things that affect memoery usage that are out of our control. If you want to make your report useful to us, please follow instructions from this post: https://orionfeedback.org/d/4480-check-memory-usage/54