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Limiting Facebook from eating up all system memory on 4GB RAM computer?

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DaveLembke:
Was wondering if anyone knew of a way to limit system memory to a certain cap for specific or any websites that are open in the browser?

My wife has this strange thing happening where the longer that Facebook is open and navigated it seems to build up with some sort of cached content that it wont unload and so it starts to first eat up system RAM and then the system notices that more memory is needed and so it starts to cause excessive paging and then when the hard drive is running 100% utilization in task manager of Windows 10 Home 64-Bit the system starts to become almost unresponsive as in you can move the mouse pointer around but the browser is now extremely slow to react to telling it to close tabs or anything else including trying to shut down the browser. In addition to this Windows 10 is almost unresponsive to entering TaskMGR in the Search Windows box to launch Task Manager to see how badly its brought the system to its knees.

Ran a hard drive test and its all healthy. Also ran Memtest86 to make sure everything is good with that. Also ran Malwarebytes to make sure she didnt have malware hijacking RAM.

Thought it was something to do with Firefox and so I had her try out Edge, but Edge has the same issue. I then tried Chrome and Chrome had the same issue. Gave up trying to find a browser that Facebook wouldnt suck every last drop of system RAM through. However if there is a browser that has an ability to memory cap a website or tab I'd be willing to try that.

The computer is a Core 2 Duo 3.0Ghz HP SFF with 4GB RAM and unfortunately it cant take an upgrade to any more than 4GB.

I have tried all sorts of things like disabling the Superfetch of Windows 10 so that it doesnt try to cache stuff and this is no help.

The page file is Windows managed size and it gets huge. I havent set it to like 6GB maximum or anything like that as for I dont see that as a solution.

I could upgrade her from a HDD to a SSD but this would just mean that that poor SSD would get battered with excessive read/writes so i havent gone this route.

I looked online for a way to cap Facebook to only being able to use like 1GB of RAM and havent found a way to cap it. Also went on a search to see if I can set a maximum amount of memory per tab but also didnt seem to find anything.

Currently i have told my wife that when she is done with Facebook to exit it and this seems to work, but she is like your the IT Guru come up with a solution so that I dont have to close Facebook.

Additional Information is that this HP SFF computer I gave her as an emergency replacement because she blew the power supply in her original full tower. I have a power supply on order for that and when that arrives I hope to eventually get her back onto her Quadcore system, however her Quadcore computer has a SSD and only 4GB RAM and so this Facebook issue on this s computer with 4GB RAM may have pointed out that the SSD in her other system may have been getting hit heavily with excessive Read/Write conditions but because the SSD is so much faster than a HDD it doesnt cause lag I am guessing.

The solution might be to throw more system RAM at the problem, however I have read about others online complaining about how Facebook grows and one guy with 32GB RAM claimed that Facebook grew to consuming 16GB of the 32GB RAM and he was looking for a solution to it.

Lots of finger pointing at Facebook for making sloppy code that doesnt unload old content and allowing it to build and build.

Myself I dont use Facebook long enough to have this problem. I get on and check it out and then when done I exit it and the RAM is given back to the system again, but also my computer has 8GB RAM.

Figured I'd post this here to see if anyone knew of any solutions that i could try to see if I can force facebook to lesser RAM. Only method I came up with is to run facebook within a virtual machine where the virtual machine can only grow to the memory allocation that the virtual machine was set up to, but a system with 4GB RAM doesnt have much breathing room to host 2 copies of Windows 10 at the same time because your then looking at like 2GB for Physical PC and 2GB for Virtual PC to which performance would take a hit, as well as this system is just a Core 2 Duo 8000 series 3.0Ghz and so it would be balanced at 1 core per OS and that too isnt going to work out that great.

It would be cool if there was a addon for Firefox or something to force a memory cap to tabs or websites, but i havent found anything yet.  :-\

alan mayans:
Hey Dave, could you find the solution? 

I'm trying to solve the same thing on my girlfriend's new notebook

ImnoGuru:
It seems this is a common problem. My computer does the same thing. Im looking for a solution to it as well.

Good luck.
ImnoGuru

DaveLembke:
Sorry that I dont have any helpful info to report back on this.

The computer with the 4GB RAM was replaced with one with 8GB and Windows 10 and the solution seems to be just exiting Facebook and closing the browser when not in use. Both Firefox and Chrome seem to grow if left open. And so closing them and opening them when you need them seems to be the solution to not having a browser consuming lots of RAM and Paging memory.

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