Firefox 29 periodic crash

Question

Dear Firefox,
I have been using your product for some years and am quite happy with it. I was a long time user of FF28 and even though it has some few downsides, it was performed quite well.
I am a heavy internet user, by heavy I meant I constantly have 500-1800 tabs open at any given time and before making suggestions to my internet habit please know that there are users like me. So please refrain from saying I should fix my habit.
Before this, when using FF28, firefox would crash, sometimes. By sometimes I meant I can go 1-1.5 full day minimum without FF crashing even with 1800 tabs (I never switch my PC off, no need to.). Sometimes I get 3 full days. But after updating to FF29, firefox periodically crash. By periodic I meant it will hold at most 6-10 hours.
Before you ask, I have tried the suggestions. enabling or disabling hardware acceleration makes no difference. And mind you I have 32 gb ram. I never hit more than 12 gb usage, even with matlab running in the background, and some other applications (most of them pdfs and a couple instances of vlcs.)
So I do not think the problem is caused by memory. However I do notice that firefox seems to crash when it hits a certain amount of memory usage. Despite my huge RAM, it never utilises more than 2 gb, which is funny, because the reason I max my ram slots was so that I could use a lot of tabs.
And I don't think the problem is caused by flash either. At worst, my browser becomes unresponsive. Once I killed he process, it's back to normal. Flash never crashes my firefox by itself. And plugins? I only have a few of them, most of them disabled most of the time. (I'm a minimalist when it comes to browser.)
Does Firefox have a limit as to how much memory it can manage? Bear in mind whenever firefox crash none of my other programs were affected. If you're pointing to hardware, my PC runs very cool. It runs the latest drivers and my cpu temp never exceed 55 degrees. GPU never exceed 70. most of the time they run in the 30s range.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Again, thank you for a great product. But there's something that needs to be fixed with FF 29. Thanks!

Answer 1

Your crash signatures has a familiar face here.
*gfxContext::PushClipsToDT(mozilla::gfx::DrawTarget
Firefox has hardware acceleration set to "on" by default, but it's still young, which means some video cards or drivers might have problems with it. You can try to disable hardware acceleration to see if that alleviates your problems.
You might need to restart Firefox in order for this to take effect, so save all work first (e.g., mail you are composing, online documents you're editing, etc.).
Then perform these steps for Firefox version 29.0 and above:
*Click the menu button [[Image:New Fx Menu]] and select Options for Windows or Preferences on Mac or Linux. For Firefox 28.0 and previous versions, click the orange Firefox button at the top left, then select the "Options" button, or, if there is no Firefox button at the top, go to Tools > Options.
*In the Firefox options window, click the ''Advanced'' tab, then select "General".
*In the settings list, you should find the ''Use hardware acceleration when available'' checkbox. Uncheck this checkbox.
*Now, restart Firefox and see if the problems persist.
Additionally, please check for updates for your graphics driver by following the steps mentioned in the following Knowledge base articles:
* [[Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems]]
* [[Upgrade your graphics drivers to use hardware acceleration and WebGL]]