Firefox triggering warning and heating up laptop

[AMSOS]

Hi. I have a 2017 Air (8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD) on which I mostly type and surf the internet.


For months Mac OS Mojave has been warning me about "running out of disk space," and the upper left corner of the keyboard heats up more than usual. I've now narrowed it down to some issue with Firefox.


When I see the warning, the laptop also heats up more than usual, and activity monitor shows a process "coresymbolicationd" constantly running.


First, troubleshoot mode in Firefox solved the issue. Then I decided to uninstall FF and go with LibreWolf. After a few days, I notice that coresymbolicationd is now working in the background and the laptop is also heating up. Note that I don't have extensions installed.


When I use Brave browser, none of these issues occur.


I'd appreciate your thoughts and any solutions you may have. I really do need Firefox for my work.


Thanks!

 

[bogdanw]

First, try Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/all/#product-desktop-esr

If the problem persists, according to Apple:
“ coresymbolicationd manages the system cache of symbol information for OS libraries. Users can directly view or modify the contents of this cache using the symbolscache(1) utility.”
and
“Delete all entries belonging to user 501:
symbolscache delete --uid 501”

 

[AMSOS]

First, try Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/all/#product-desktop-esr

If the problem persists, according to Apple:
“ coresymbolicationd manages the system cache of symbol information for OS libraries. Users can directly view or modify the contents of this cache using the symbolscache(1) utility.”
and
“Delete all entries belonging to user 501:
symbolscache delete --uid 501”

Thanks, this helps. I do notice that the low disk warning comes on only occasionally now. I think I'll stick to using LibreWolf for a week or so, and see if the issue persists.

There's obviously other privacy benefits to using LibreWolf which I want to avail.

If that doesn't work, I'll follow up on the the steps you suggest.

I looked around and this is the only link that seems relevant:

https://www.unix.com/man-page/mojave/1/symbolscache

Is this what Apple recommends? Which one should I download?

Thanks!

 

[antiprotest]

Just curious. How much free disk space do you actually have left?

 

[bogdanw]

Is this what Apple recommends? Which one should I download?

There is nothing to download, you can run symbolscache in Terminal, it's part of macOS.

 

[AMSOS]

Just curious. How much free disk space do you actually have left?

At its worst, it fluctuates wildly. I see system storage (About this Mac-Storage) at 48 GB and it behaves normally. Then quickly it may shoot up to 60 GB or so, and I start getting warnings.
The white space (free disk space) is easily 52 GB (when system space is shown as 48 GB).
I've always been careful with managing files on my laptop, and try to keep 50% free space (even on my iPhone).

 

[AMSOS]

There is nothing to download, you can run symbolscache in Terminal, it's part of macOS.

I see, thanks. I put in symbolscache(1) in Terminal and it returned a description.
I am not sure I can do this on my own. Please send a link that helps me run this.
Thanks!

 

[bogdanw]

I see, thanks. I put in symbolscache(1) in Terminal and it returned a description.

It’s in the second post, to delete all entries belonging to user 501 (501 is the main admin account, presumably your account), run in Terminal

sudo symbolscache delete --uid 501

Although not required by Apple, I would reboot after running the command.