Firefox triggering warning and heating up laptop

[samos]

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!

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hi,

Glad you narrowed the issue down from your previous post. Maybe the Firefox cache was expanding at an abnormal rate, triggering the low disk space warning? If a system process is eating up a lot of CPU cycles, the Mac will heat up and the fans will turn on.

I don't use Firefox personally...just Safari and Google Chrome.

coresymbolicationd is a standard macOS process that is always running, that has something to do with caching. Here is a discussion that explains it a bit: what is com.apple.coresymbolicationd in caches? Of course, I never recommend deleting parts of macOS, and never without a proper Time Machine or other backup.

Mojave is known to have some issues and it is usually best to upgrade to Catalina or later. Is there a paerticular reason you stayed with macOS Mojave?

C

 

[samos]

Glad you narrowed the issue down from your previous post. Maybe the Firefox cache was expanding at an abnormal rate, triggering the low disk space warning? If a system process is eating up a lot of CPU cycles, the Mac will heat up and the fans will turn on.

This is exactly what it looks like is happening. 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.

I don't use Firefox personally...just Safari and Google Chrome.

Mostly I like Firefox for an extension, and privacy. Chrome I use for it's Meet software only. Safari is good, but I don't like how it handles bookmarks.

coresymbolicationd is a standard macOS process that is always running, that has something to do with caching. Here is a discussion that explains it a bit: what is com.apple.coresymbolicationd in caches? Of course, I never recommend deleting parts of macOS, and never without a proper Time Machine or other backup.

Thanks. I'll certainly not delete this even if I have TM backups (which I do). It's more important to figure out the core problem.

Mojave is known to have some issues and it is usually best to upgrade to Catalina or later. Is there a paerticular reason you stayed with macOS Mojave?

Well, it's worked pretty okay these past 3 years. I have installations for an older version of MS Office which won't work with Big Sur and newer.

This is a bit of a digression, but can I install Catalina from somewhere reliable, preferably Apple?

Thanks!