Browser Issue: "out of memory" page crashes

I use the Opera browser and used to be able to have more than a dozen tabs open at once, a few playing video, but now I'm am getting many "out of memory" tab crashes. I thought there was something wrong with Opera so I downloaded Chrome and installed it and had the same issue happening the first time I ran it.

Running CCleaner helped at first but now in no time the issue comes up even after running CCleaner.

I'm running Windows 10 Home (64 bit) on a Lenovo computer with 6 gigs of RAM.

All help appreciated.

a reply to: ipsedixit

In the upper right corner of your screen you'll see a button with 3 vertical dots. Click that. Then click "more tools". Then click "clear browsing history". A dialog box will pop up asking you what exactly you'd like to remove. Select everything except your cookies and click ok.

a reply to: Bone75

Did as you suggested and this is what happened.



The screen also went black for a second and adjusted the resolution so that everything looked as if I was in "safe mode", that is, big.

Here is the Opera message:



I also just got a notice to update my flash player. I'm wondering if this kind of thing is related to background activity being carried on by Windows or Norton or Adobe, etc.

Depends on the pages you are loading sometimes, too. A lot of "code" has moved back into the browser via _javascript. If someone has a badly written page, you can get out of memory errors if the _javascript in the browser is in an infinite loop, trying to load something external it can't find, etc.

The fact that it happened on both opera and chrome would make me think it was the site you loaded, not anything local to your system. (I've even seen commercial sites like salesforce have issues like this once in a while when they do updates, and inadvertently introduce some bad code that kills the browser)

a reply to: ipsedixit

looks like you've been attacked by something. Possibly some ad has infected your browser.

Things seem to be alright at the moment. I did update the Adobe Flash player and was wondering if background activity from Adobe might be the cause of the problem.

I did a quick scan with Norton and that came up empty.

I downloaded the MS malware removal tool but, though I clicked on it I don't know if it ran. Will try it again.

Tried the MS malware removal tool. It's scan detected no malicious software.

Open wi ndows task manager and see how many programs and processes are running. Post a screenshot of both if you can. Check for anything using an abnormally large amount of ram.

originally posted by: ipsedixit
I use the Opera browser and used to be able to have more than a dozen tabs open at once, a few playing video, but now I'm am getting many "out of memory" tab crashes. I thought there was something wrong with Opera so I downloaded Chrome and installed it and had the same issue happening the first time I ran it.

Running CCleaner helped at first but now in no time the issue comes up even after running CCleaner.

I'm running Windows 10 Home (64 bit) on a Lenovo computer with 6 gigs of RAM.

All help appreciated.

Go into incognito mode and see if it still happens. To into the browser settings and clear all data and cache. Do you have any browser extensions enabled? Have you messed with the virtual memory on the PC at all? Do you know if Windows is handling virtual memory or have you allocated it yourself?

originally posted by: ipsedixit
I use the Opera browser and used to be able to have more than a dozen tabs open at once, a few playing video, but now I'm am getting many "out of memory" tab crashes. I thought there was something wrong with Opera so I downloaded Chrome and installed it and had the same issue happening the first time I ran it.

Running CCleaner helped at first but now in no time the issue comes up even after running CCleaner.

I'm running Windows 10 Home (64 bit) on a Lenovo computer with 6 gigs of RAM.

All help appreciated.

By the way -- dump Norton. Its a resource hog and slows down your PC more than it protects.

a reply to: Kukri

The biggest RAM users among processes running are the Opera browser at 311 megs and Service Host Superfetch at 65 megs. Everything else is either single digits or less, of RAM, or low double digits.

Can't take a screen shot. It would require scrolling.

originally posted by: imthegoat

By the way -- dump Norton. Its a resource hog and slows down your PC more than it protects.

Duly noted. Generally speaking I am satisfied with performance of both computer and anti-virus. Occasionally it tells me it's blocked something.

a reply to: imthegoat

Things seem to be fine now, after the Adobe flash update, but during the problem "Incognito" was giving me the same problems. As far as virtual memory is concerned. I may have increased it in response to this issue, weeks ago, but I think it is running at the default setting now. I'll have to check.

Edit:

Virtual memory is set at 18 plus gigabytes, which seems like a large amount for the purpose.

I've had this issue for a couple of years.

Chrome is SNIP.

It is a memory issue.

They say it's not.

They tell you to do x,y,z.

Does NOT fix it.

It's aggravating as hell.

They put so much crap on websites anymore, and that's the problem.

Flash this,Flash that

Ads out the rear.

They keep it up your gonna need 128 gigs of memory just to surf the web.

a reply to: neo96

I think so. The problem is going on behind the scenes. I don't think it is a coincidence that it happened in connection with an Adobe flash update. Also Windows itself and Norton antivirus are apt to be doing things on their own. And then, as you say, the websites themselves are up to all sorts of shenanigans in the background.

Try This

I'll keep digging for you but the task manager should show exactly what's using up all your memory. Did you change any virtual memory settings recently?

You might uninstall the Adobe and see if that fixes the problem. If it does, then you know that's the issue. If so, reinstall it after uninstall... see if it happens again... if it does. You got the answer. Just download a previous version of it and turn off auto updates until the issue is resolved.

Was this the only thing you know that was changed prior to this happening? It would have been before the last boot prior to the problem.


Also.... This page sounds a lil more like what you're dealing with.


Oh yeah... Check disk space!

Happens on the VM instances I use to run my web browsers. A dozen tabs cause terrible slowdown. It's the web browsers themselves. They just use up so much memory for all the widgets that go into each web page (over 1000 nodes at the last count).

1) Check free space on the HDD which leads to 2 below . Not enough space , means not enough pagefile. Not enough pagefile means not enough memory ( pagefile + physical = memory)

2)Check your pagefile size...
How to increase Page File size or Virtual Memory in Windows 10/8/7

Did you by any chance run a systems check on your RAM memory to make sure all is well?

Thanks for all the responses. Things seem to have settled right down again, which tends to confirm me in the view that what happened was the result of "background activity" that is no longer happening but that will likely come up again if Windows does an update or something similar happens, or if two such events happen at the same time. Today I haven't had a tab crash at all.

One of StallionDuck's links made a reference to "Sleep Mode" which I've been using lately, and didn't seem to think much of it. If that is piling up data in some way, maybe it is related to a "memory problem".

a reply to: ipsedixit
The calming down could mean lowered background activity ... full shutdowns in Windows is so important - clears RAM on NIC and CPU - restarts don't.

Page-swap.sys file size and disk space is also huge as mentioned by others.

Also, I don't know about Opera, but, Chrome will piggy-back off IE11 Proxy Settings. A clear cache or full reset in IE11 may help you quite a bit - even if you don't normally run IE11, or Edge - they are very interwoven in the OS like .NET is.

Don't forget the good ol' DNS and nbtstat flush and reset winsock DOS commands - they can really clear stuff out.