Mozilla MemShrink Set To Fix Firefox Memory 375
darthcamaro writes "If you're like a lot of Firefox 4 users out there, you've probably noticed that Firefox has a serious memory problem — it uses more than it really should. At long last, Mozilla developers are finally set to take this issue seriously with a dedicated team called MemShrink that are focused on the problem. 'It's pretty clear by now that this is a much bigger problem than any one person can likely tackle,' Mozilla Developer Johnny Stenback said."
bound to fail (Score:4, Funny)
Any gains they make will be eaten up by the rapidly increasing version number.
Re:bound to fail (Score:5, Funny)
64 bits is only 8 bytes. An unsigned 64-bit number can take Firefox all the way up to version 18,446,744,073,709,551,615.
So that should take them at least until through next Thursday.
Please. (Score:2)
Please, don't remind me of X 10 and their pop-under ads for webcams.
Re: (Score:2)
void *myHeap = malloc( get_version() * 100 * MEG ).
Three opportunities to reduce total memory usage, there.
Problem of perception? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think at least part of the problem is perception. Most people seem to have this mindset that using RAM is bad, and the more memory you have free and unused the faster your computer will be. These are the same people who think they're increasing their computer's performance by turning off superfetch, etc.The problem with this perception is that it's completely stupid.
Programs load data into memory because memory is fast and your disk and the network are significantly slower; hundreds or thousands of times
Re: (Score:2)
Naw, efficient programming is the hallmark of good code.
Here, my machine seems to take a long time to recover "Firefox is in use" after you close an instance. That's annoying.
Re:Problem of perception? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it were possible for programs to allocate caches that work like the filesystem cache, where old items get discarded automatically to make room for anything more important, then this would make sense. But in real life, when a program written with that "unused memory is wasted memory" philosophy has filled up RAM and you start another program, the first program will have to go to the swapfile. Return to it later and it'll take forever to become usable again, while it gets re-loaded 4kB at a time. (I'll usually just kill the firefox.exe process and restart it when this happens, because that's actually faster)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Problem of perception? (Score:5, Informative)
as this amount decreases Firefox can begin to proactively free memory used for the oldest cached data.
So your suggestion is that each application running should be fine allocating a huge cache and changing its memory footprint according to how much memory it sees available on the entire system, instead of the OS making a decision?
I am not sure I am convinced that the outcome of that methodology is optimal. If it were; I think i'd favor "number of pages swapped in/out per second" over amount of memory free, though.
I am trying to imagine the interactions of 4 or 5 different applications all running with a huge cache, and the same behavior.... when memory usage is low, all 5 applications prepare a huge cache -- their huge cache causes the total memory free to drop, eventually to 1MB... now, suddenly, all 5 applications will use a bit of CPU time proactively freeing up large swaths of cache -- CPU will be 100% running for a couple seconds, as processes adjust their memory.
After all 5 apps reduce their huge caches, suddenly there will now be a lot of memory free --- so much memory free, that one or more of the applications might immediately see an opportunity for increased caching.
So what mechanism will protect fairness? Each application will believe its cache is important, but who's to say one of the applications isn't more important to the user, or having more requests more frequently made of it (so that the user's performance will best if application X's cache is bigger versus application Y).
There seems a fundamental weakness here, involving each application trying to make their own memory management decisions about cache --- the application making the decision to expand its cache may be the one the user cares about the least, and the one whose cache is the least useful.
The OS is in a position to make decisions and mediate in regards to the working set needs of processes, and the user's actual usage patterns. The OS knows which running process makes the most demand of its cache -- the other processes don't know much about each other.
Re: (Score:2)
First off, for better or for worse there's no way for an OS to actually free an allocation used by an application in either Linux or Windows. There is no mechanism in either the page or heap allocation APIs in either operating system to declare an allocation in such a way as to let the OS know that instead of paging this memory to disk when low on memory, it should instead just free it and let the application know it has done so. It's a good idea, but it doesn't exist. Secondly, the OS really doesn't have a
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Problem of perception? (Score:5, Informative)
The system you describe is called malloc()!
In a system with a unified buffer cache (essentially, every OS in wide use except OpenBSD), it makes little difference whether a page of memory comes from a private memory allocation (e.g., a heap allocation), a memory-mapped file, or the OS's disk cache. When a process needs a page not already present in memory, the kernel's memory manager tries to find an unused page. If one is available, it hands it to the program that requested memory.
Otherwise, it looks for an in-use page, saves its contents, and hands the just-freed page to the program requesting memory. If that page is "dirty" --- i.e., it's backed by a file and somebody's written to that part of the file, or it's a private allocation backed by the page file --- the memory manager writes the page out to disk first. If the page isn't dirty, the memory manager can just discard its contents because it knows it can reconstruct it by reading back the original file.
When the memory manager has to go to disk to satisfy a request for a new page, it's called a hard fault. The mission of the memory manager is to reduce the number of hard faults, because hard faults are slow. The fewer hard faults you have, the less time will be spent waiting for the disk, and the faster your system will run.
The most important part of the memory manager is page replacement: i.e., how the memory chooses what page to evict in order to satisfy a memory allocation request. Most systems use an approximation of LRU (i.e., least recently used), throwing out pages that haven't been accessed in a while. It doesn't usually matter where a page came from. The only important factor is how recently it was accessed.
So, you can see that there's no difference between a program mapping a file into memory and modifying it, reading and writing it using file APIs, and just manipulating an equal amount of information in buffers created with malloc. To the kernel, all memory is made up of pages.
The "go away for a while" problem isn't caused by any particular memory strategy. It's an artifact of the memory manager's LRU approach. How does it know that the pages corresponding to Firefox are going to be used again? If some other program needs those pages, the older ones will be discarded. There is nothing applications can do.
Instead, the OS itself has to be tweaked to preserve interactivity. Sometimes the memory manager will prefer disk cache pages to malloc-backed ones. Sometimes (e.g., for Windows SuperFetch) the OS will try to identify pages belonging to activate applications and try harder to keep those in memory. Some systems favor keeping executable pages over private allocations. You can tweak the page replacement algorithm, but the basic idea, that all memory is made up of pages subject to the same management scheme, applies.
Ultimately, it's ridiculous to hear people talk about programs "keeping things in memory" like we were still dealing with DOS 6 and OS 9. The actual situation is a lot more subtle, and silly memory counters don't even come close to giving you a good picture of what's actually going on.
In short, don't worry about fine-tuning what's "in memory". Don't change behavior based on total amount of memory in the system. Operating systems (OpenBSD aside) ALREADY DO THAT. Just let the memory manager do its job, and give it enough information (via interactivity information, memory priority, etc.) to do its job properly. Don't try to hack around problems at the wrong layers.
Re:Problem of perception? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, the sounds of someone spewing the 80's virtual memory rhetoric.
There's more to it then that. I could go into it, but I'm supposed to be studying for a psychology exam, so I'll be brief.
You assume that the OS will make sensible paging decisions. You assume you can hint to the OS that you're going to make sensible paging decisions. You hope the application, which is likely big, multithreaded and such, is doing the sensible thing of not wrapping large accesses to "memory things" (eg big trees of data, as an example, or image caches, or whatever takes up more than a small bit of RAM) in mutexes. You assume that your application is using memory in a sensible fashion, and not simply using a few bytes here and there in each allocated chunk.
The trouble is, application writers have been taught from an "early" age that hey, memory is cheap, the OS will handle paging out unused bits, so please go right ahead and use it without caring about how it's used. This is how you end up with application behaviours which include, but aren't limited to:
* walking a tree requires a page in (ie, a random disk read) for each tree node touched. Because each node is malloc()'ed, and although on modern implementations small objects are packed into pages, your 10,000 tree node is going to likely be spread across multiple pages based on when and how often you allocated them ('temporal location');
* this also means your memory use versus memory allocation isn't terribly efficient ('fragmentation');
* your mutex protected data structures are suddenly now mutex'ing _page disk access_, so whilst the OS is busy paging in your data, all other threads currently trying to do stuff that requires that mutex (which may even not require paging in) suddenly has to stop and wait for your page-in to complete.
It's a real shame that memory management has really stopped progressing since virtual memory systems were made. They're convenient, but they hide the worst case behaviours from unknowing coders. Then those worse case behaviours become _very_ worse case behaviours which can't be changed without a fundamental rearchitecture of your software. Likely what people are realising here.
Enjoy!
Re: (Score:3)
The operating system only knows more about the state of the entire system. It can't know what the application is doing. It can't know that paging A to disk is going to hurt more than B. This is the kind of silly crap that goes on when you work on such enormously complicated bits of software that assumes that memory access is always going to be uniform, that threads never block for more than a few microseconds unless you want them to. Even the smallest bit of paging just so the OS can make room for applicati
Re: (Score:2)
And of course both IE8/9 and Chrome take rather more RAM than FF...
Re:Problem of perception? (Score:5, Insightful)
Using ram is 'good' and 'superfetch' are good too huh?
How did that info get into memory. Oh thats right by me waiting for it to load from either the internet or from disk.
Back when I used vista turning superfetch off was the #1 way to make the computer usable. Superfetch was too aggressive in loading things. Turn computer on wait 15 mins (no kidding) before I could use the start button. It was even so aggressive it would keep memory full at all times. Meaning as programs freed and used memory the disk was thrashing ALL the time. It was noticeably faster and measurable too (I measured it many times thinking guys like you must be right). Win 7 is a whole different story (it actually works).
As for using too much memory. Using less does mean better performance. *IF* done right. But how much of that information in this case is just 'leaks'? A leak is never going to be used. Meaning windows needs to keep track of it and page it out a some point (meaning less performance at some point).
To bury your head in the sand and say using memory is bad is stupid. But so is using it all up is good. But think about this I have open 1 tab right now to type this in. It is using 250 meg (and that is just what is paged in meaning something in the program touched it). WTF is it doing... That is a seriously crazy amount of memory to be using to have this page open which about 30k. That is some serious overhead there. From this old 80s/90s programmer I look at that and think wtf dudes. You KNOW you can do better than that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
i don't have a problem with firefox eating up all my memory. but what i do have a problem with is that after 2-3 days, firefox starts eating up 20-30% cpu! even if i close all of my tabs and look at a blank tab, the cpu usage is continuous. then i have no option but to restart firefox. battery life is affected, the computer runs hotter, etc. and the best thing? this was not a problem in any of the previous versions.
Re: (Score:3)
That would be completely true if machines don't have any swap. Most people have a fairly large swap however--larger than their amount of actual physical memory--and on the same disk as their data.
What this means is that the larger your footprint, the higher the chance of part of your program loading from the hard disk when you're context switching. Sure, a program with a smaller memory footprint has the same issues, but when there's less of it on disk (even if the percentage is the same), the perceived cont
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I use this little restart firefox extension, kind of a cool trick.. Also config trim on minimize (google it).
Re:Problem of perception? (Score:5, Insightful)
it's not designed to be open for a week straight.
Then it needs to be redesigned.
I do not need a server to become sluggish because a user left on vacation with Firefox still running with a detached display.
And I do not want to have to close my munin/bigbrother/mrtg windows running on the wall monitor. It should keep running.
Remember how we ridiculed Microsoft for Windows 95 not being able to run more than a few days without a reboot? Well, it's time we laugh at the idiotic Firefox devs who repeat the same mistakes and invalid assumptions.
Because of the severe bloat and WTF assumptions made by the newer generation of Firefox devs, I've started using other browsers more and more. Like Midori ("it's not easy being green").
Re: (Score:3)
I run Ubuntu 32-bit PAE, and the 4GB/process memory limit leaves me another 4GB after Firefox uses it up. :)
Re:bound to fail (Score:4, Funny)
I consider this a Firefox problem not a version problem. I have always found that Firefox uses allot of memory.
You're right. And the way they're going to fix that problem is they'll recruit a team of people to find out exactly where this memory usage is coming from, then they'll come to Slashdot and write posts describing how it's the user's fault.
And probably too big... (Score:2)
...for one post-hoc team to fix after the rest have gone on a rampage. Still, I suppose it's better than not having such a group.
Re:And probably too big... (Score:5, Informative)
My experience has been that both leaks and overall memory use have gone down between 3.0 and 4.0.
At the moment, Firefox is at about 375 megabytes, with 16 tabs open. It has been open for 3 weeks. I do have browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers set to 3 and the anti-malware databases disabled though.
Re: (Score:2)
Same experience here, and without using either of those settings. FF4 is still a hog, but not nearly as bad as FF3 was. I would restart FF3 after I'd left it running for more than 2 days. FF4 seems to get me closer to 5 or 6 days before I notice a problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Are they though? I keep hearing anecdotally that people are switching in droves from Firefox to Chrome, but considering most of it is due to things like memory use and speed, I can't help but think that the numbers are exaggerated. For one thing Firefox has been using less RAM than the competition for quite some time now. And for another thing, Firefox, unlike many of the competitors, chrome I'm looking at you, is actually a full featured browser which is relatively stable. There's not a lot of cruft being
All browsers are consuming more memory. (Score:2)
I do not mean to sound like a troll, but it seems all browsers are consuming more and more memory. Chrome being the worst (due to every tab being sandboxed?), Safari is equal to Firefox.
Why is memory usage increasing so much in recent years? Firefox is currently consuming 450MB on my machine with only a few tabs open.
Re:All browsers are consuming more memory. (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of it's got to be the increasing size of web pages in general. Now that most folks have higher bandwidth connections, web designers don't focus on keeping the download size small.
Multiply that increase by the size of your cache (how many times can you click "back" without hitting the disk?) and you can see the full scope of the problem.
Re:All browsers are consuming more memory. (Score:5, Informative)
A useful new feature in latest Nightly versions from Mozilla is about:memory. It gives you a full tree view of where the memory is being used. Of my 360MB which the browser is currently using, 101MB is JS, 46MB is storage (you back button and memory cache), 70MB on "heap-unclassified" whatever that is. JS seems to be the biggest consumer of memory.
Re: (Score:2)
That's odd that they're making a distinction between Javascript and "storage." After all, isn't (most) Javascript associated with a specific page?
Re: (Score:3)
It probably means memory allocated by the JS interpreter itself, whereas "storage" is more of a file and bitmap cache. Just guessing here (though I have hacked on Firefox code in the past).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
>SQLite databases which it uses to store profile data.
Which would include, among other things, "cookies, local/sessionstorage JS APIs, and the WebDB"
Re: (Score:2)
70MB on "heap-unclassified" whatever that is
It probably means exactly what it says, heap* allocations that haven't been marked as anything in particular.
* The heap is where allocations made with the likes of malloc and similar constructs are allocated from (contrast with the global variables which have fixed locations and the local variables which are located on the stack).
Re: (Score:2)
JS seems to be the biggest consumer of memory.
Good to know. Less memory usage, yet another benefit of running NoScript.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh, come on now, Netscape 4 would have taken at least half a megabyte to show those pages!
Wait, that wasn't a good argument.
Re: (Score:3)
A useful new feature in latest Nightly versions from Mozilla is about:memory. It gives you a full tree view of where the memory is being used.
Is this per-tab or global?
I need a 'top' like function for Mozilla that will tell me which tabs are using resources (usually a flash object that snuck by me).
Does FF5 let me use 'top' proper with per-page processes?
Re: (Score:2)
That's all? 450mb? I just checked and the latest version of FF4x is currently using 2.1gb on my system.
Anyway, I thought Firefox didn't have a memory leak? It's just how firefox is *supposed* to behave. That's what they've been saying since 3.0. You can go back to countless threads on Slashdot rehashing the same thing. "Firefox is using insane amounts of memory"... "Shut up, dumb ass, you don't know anything! It's SUPPOSED to use a gig or two!"
Re: (Score:3)
Wish I had mod points for you. But you also forgot to mention the people who say "Shut up dumb ass, you've clearly got a shitty system and/or are incompetent!" or the "Shut up dumb ass, you're obviously using the wrong/too many extensions!" as well as the "Shut up dumb ass, you've got too many tabs open" and the "Shut up dumb ass, you're not meant to keep it running for days!" crowd.
To those of you who can manage to open a hojillion tabs and keep them open for months at a time, congratulations, we're happy
Re: (Score:2)
My SeaMonkey nightly (probably similar to FF5, or did they branch with 4?) is 1.8 GB Res and 2.8 GB Virt on Linux, but I am well north of 100 tabs right now...
Still not hitting swap 90% of the time with 4GB RAM and Awesome WM
Re: (Score:2)
Firefox doesn't have a memory leak. Or at least none of any note. I'm curious how you're managing to use 2.1gb of RAM, I have yet to see my copy on Windows, Linux or FreeBSD manage that. I rarely if ever see the browser use more than 300MB.
It definitely could happen, but I'd want some indication that it's the browser itself and not the typical assortment of plug ins.
Re: (Score:2)
Why is memory usage increasing so much in recent years? Firefox is currently consuming 450MB on my machine with only a few tabs open.
I just checked and ... you're right. Same here (Windows 7 x64). I have eight tabs open, memory usage is 450MB and counting. And I can just sit here and watch Firefox's memory usage slowly go up... and up... and up... while I do nothing. What's more, some people I know have a habit of leaving the browser running for days with hundreds of tabs. Not me. I'm so old fashioned that not only do I put my computer to sleep when I walk away from it, but I actually close all my running apps before I do so. So Firefox
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
To be honest, Firefox could be using double the amount of memory it currently does, and I wouldn't care. Firefox's biggest problem is that its performance isn't consistent. Use it for any amount of time and you'll notice that quite frequently the entire UI will freeze for long periods of time (0.5s-1s) for unknown reasons, which is extremely annoying. I don't care what it's doing, it shouldn't be freezing the UI. No, I don't have any extensions (except Firebug, which is Firefox's only compelling feature). A
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Why is memory usage increasing so much in recent years?"
It's always been increasing. There's nobody tracking it (maybe; I'm sure the interwebs can find someone going all OCD over it) as there's no Moore's Law for Memory Usage to be kowtowed to every time it increases, but the design of OO code libraries means that enormous things can be hidden behind a simple instantiation.
The solution is more orthogonality, but software is fairly fractal, so if your program has a very rich feature set (and browsers are t
Re: (Score:2)
I think that's about right and if I had mod points I'd give you some. I've been an Opera devotee for 12-13 years. Opera has always been pretty good at memory management, IMO, but nowadays, it uses as much as the next browser. Right now, 6 tabs open for the last 2 hrs and I'm sitting at about 512 megs used. Of course, it doesn't seem to be as big a deal when systems are built with 6-8 gigs minimum as the standard. Even so, I'm still relentlessly concerned about every spare resource my rig uses.
Re:All browsers are consuming more memory. (Score:4, Informative)
There are several things going on here:
1) JS JITs. These optimize for speed of compilation and speed of generated code; small size of generated code is not really something being optimized for except insofar as it helps one of the other two metrics. In the case of Firefox, just deciding to JIT a little less aggressively late in the 4.0 cycle saved a good bit of memory when JS-heavy pages are open.
2) Images. Sites are using more and more bigger images, in addition to larger and larger scripts. With images you have the options of decompressing on draw (slow, typically) or storing decompressed images in memory (uses lots of memory). Guess which one browsers are typically doing?
3) Leaks in webpages. By this I mean web pages that allocate more and more JS objects and have them all reachable (e.g. by sticking things in an array that's hanging off the Window) so the web page uses more and more memory. gmail did this until recently; they were working on fixing it last I checked. This means that if one of your "few tabs" is gmail and you've had it open for a while a lot of that memory could be actually being used by gmail.
about:memory in Firefox is being improved to make it easier to answer the "what's using the memory" question, at least....
Re: (Score:2)
50 is small time, I was running that many sometimes during the Mozilla 1.7 timeframe (FF of that time would have choked to death).
You can fix the version number inflation too. (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't be a Chrome Clone, make the next release Firefox 4.1.
not too bad (Score:2)
I love Firefox. I don't think it takes too much memory. Sure it could use more but its not so bad. Right now for example its using 128M (after being open for days) on a 4G machine which is fine.
Re: (Score:2)
435mb currently. One tab open to slashdot, on OS X, and no plugins installed. It's about the same (+/- 50mb) on Windows 7.
It has been open for about 6 hours.
Re:not too bad (Score:5, Informative)
OS X here -- I usually have 8 to 12 tabs open. I almost never see memory usage below 500M, and it usually grows to about 1G after 2 or 3 hours. Firefox 4 for the Mac is seriously broken w.r.t. memory usage IMHO, and if they can't fix it fast, I'll probably be switching. I clobbers the performance of the whole system when it hogs that much memory. I'm tired of having to restart FF all the time.
Re: (Score:2)
I already did - I used to use FF on OS X but dropped it like a rock with FF4. They stepped backwards, at least on the Mac with 4.
However, I'm not much better off with Safari - with the Adblock extension it has a memory leak that causes it to gradually consume all available RAM after a couple of days being open. Quitting and reopening it works (closing all tabs does not). Chrome is ok (and I use both browsers side by side) and is slightly faster than Safari and doesn't chew up quite so much RAM - crucially I
Re: (Score:2)
What add-ons are you using? One of those could be contributing to that rather high RAM usage.
Re: (Score:2)
This will also happen in Gmail if you have many javascript features open. Chrome seems to m
Re: (Score:2)
Some get time-based issues in FF, others don't.
My uncle's FF gradually bloats, slows and dies if he doesn't recreate his profile or take similar measures every couple of months. Sure, his addon habits are not great, but they aren't that awful as far I can see. On the other hand, I might create a new profile every few years, and even then it is usually more for shits and giggles than real perf issues. Windows or Linux, doesn't matter.
Easy solution (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
When they make magnaram for Solaris/SPARC, let me know, until then, kindly keep your platform-dependent solutions to yourself.
Good! (Score:2)
Yes, 200MB would be fine if the computer was just being used for web browsing, or even just office stuff. But I use this machine for gaming a lot - a a recent convertee from Chrome, I'm used to being able to start up a massive memory-hog game without needing to close out my browser.
Re: (Score:2)
DDR3 Memory is DIRT CHEAP now. I'd strongly encourage you to buy more. If you are on a 32-bit OS, then upgrade!
e.g.: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231277 [newegg.com]
Re: (Score:2)
And yes, modern games will easily use 4GB.
Re: (Score:2)
I am truly sorry for your lots. It's kind of pricey to get more than 4GB in a laptop.
Re: (Score:2)
200MB?!! You must have only one tab open.
Other annoyances (Score:2)
If they could prevent a bad script or plugin from taking the whole browser with it, that would be great.
It really needs a way to see a list of what scripts and plugins are running, what resources each is consuming and the ability to kill them individually.
A list of currently open tabs would also be good, especially if it also had a history list for each tab (bonus points for making it editable, with drag and drop, etc.).
Re: (Score:2)
This is a much bigger problem in my experience. I know that they are working on that, but it seems to be taking ages. I do appreciate the effort that's going into the tab isolation, but until they do that, this sort of problem is going to persist.
unlikely (Score:2)
They closed the memory leak bug with wontfix. NOW all of a sudden they care about memory? Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it.
Re: (Score:2)
good news / bad news (Score:2)
The good news is, the team has produced a plugin that reduces the browser's memory footprint to 25 Mbytes.
The bad news is, the plugin takes up 300 Mbytes.
Not as bad as Opera (Score:2)
Firefox uses massive amounts of memory, but it's not as bad as Opera which I'm starting to suspect has a serious memory leak. On my system at the moment - Window 7 ultimate 64 bit with 6Gb memory, Firefox is using 336Mb, but Opera, with less pages open, is up to 445Mb and it's using 4% CPU in the background too. I used to use Opera a lot, but increasingly I'm relegating it because of this issue.
OTOH Chrome seems to be becoming increasingly frugal over how much it uses.
Yay (Score:5, Insightful)
Yay, it only took 5 years of bitching for them to actually look into it instead of blaming addons or your profile.
Re: (Score:3)
Yup, too late to get me back, I put up with the memory usage and the random lock ups of several seconds when it was loading an intensive page all the way through version 3, when they were all still there in version 4 I switched to Chrome. I lost a few addons that I love but the grief just wasn't worth it anymore.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm speculating, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to thank the increased competition from Chrome for this.
It's about time they dropped their delusions about their marketshare loss due to Chrome's features (or lack thereof) and realized it's the speed that attracts people. It was the same with IE5. Its speed made people continue to use it. Its security problems made people look for alternatives, Firefox being the popular alternative at that time, but Chrome offers both and that's why people switch to it despi
How to allocate more RAM to firefox? (Score:2)
I noticed this problem with Firefox and bought tons of RAM for both my Windows 7 64-bit and my Ubuntu-64 machines. Weirdly, they don't take full advantage of the extra RAM and I still get sluggishness as these programs appear to be paging to disk. I therefore welcome this advancement.
PS: If anyone has tips about how to get more memory to FF, I would greatly appreciate it.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you hitting the 2GB limit? A 32-bit program will typically only allocate up to 2GB at a time, since that's all it can map in userspace. (It can allocate more, and change the mapping window, but not many programs do that). A 64-bit program has (by the standards of modern PCs) an infinite space to map memory into. There are 64-bit versions of Firefox, but you have to go find them; the default, especially on Windows, is 32-bit even with a 64-bit OS.
One simple way to increase the prioritization of the proce
Pinpoint (Score:3, Interesting)
They could also use a DiskShrink team (Score:2)
Needs to be all of Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope this isn't just targeted towards firefox. Thunderbird is an unwieldy beast of an email app as well. No good reason that checking my email should involve consuming 200Mb of memory.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem I have with Thunderbird is the frequent freezing of scripts. It's good for them to work on cutting down the RAM consumption, but I do think it's a good idea to keep in mind the context in which this is all taking place.
Re: (Score:3)
I hope this isn't just targeted towards firefox. Thunderbird is an unwieldy beast of an email app as well. No good reason that checking my email should involve consuming 200Mb of memory.
There is a separate issue there with levels of caching of information; with some IMAP servers (notably Exchange — boo! hiss! — which I happen to be stuck with, and most of the workarounds listed out there on the 'net are outdated with recent Exchange installations as they rely on functionality that MS withdrew) there's a problem with the code that decides whether a mailbox has changed in an incompatible way and which results in a mailbox being downloaded repeatedly despite no change at all. I've
Thank you, Mozilla (Score:2)
900MB-1GB (Score:2)
Firefox 4 usually uses about 900MB of RAM after running for several days. This is not acceptable. But flaws in Chrome keep me coming back to Firefox.
How about CPU utilization? (Score:2)
When are they going to do something about CPU utilization? Firefox very regularly pins the CPU (well one core of a processor anyhow, showing it's not multithreaded well) at 100%, sometimes after just a few minutes, to the point where I can't File -> Exit, forcing the use of either task manager (on Windows) or kill -9 (on Linux). I've even blown away my profile, followed the usual tips, and yet it still happens. Now I can understand blaming a poorly-coded extension, or a corrupt profile, but why does it c
Re: (Score:2)
I'm more concerned about CPU usage.. (Score:2)
Let's do a test (Score:2)
Now let's open up 50 tabs, all for for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page [wikipedia.org]
After spinning for a bit, Firefox is now at 396 megs private and 717 megs virtual. Let's close 49 of the tabs. After letting it sit for a little bit it drops to 333 megs private and 717 megs virtual. Let's repeat that a few times without closing the wind
Re:Let's do a test (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's my list (sorted top 25, but may be misleading since some of the numbers look like sums of others)
win32/workingset 432,160,768
win32/privatebytes 420,995,072
malloc/committed 376,307,712
DescriptionValuemalloc/allocated 354,080,976
storage/sqlite/pagecache 79,423,848
js/gc-heap 66,060,288
storage/places.sqlite/Cache_Used 52,400,928
storage/urlclassifier3.sqlite/Cache_Used 24,250,888
js/string-data 7,282,684
layout/all 6,261,185
images/content/used/raw 4,043,747
images/content/used/uncompressed 3,444,586
gfx/surface/win32 3,398,208
storage/sqlite/other 1,589,512
malloc/dirty 1,097,728
js/mjit-code 913,507
storage/cookies.sqlite/Cache_Used 528,376
storage/formhistory.sqlite/Cache_Used 508,664
storage/extensions.sqlite/Cache_Used 494,144
storage/addons.sqlite/Cache_Used 362,512
content/canvas/2d_pixel_bytes 360,000
images/chrome/used/uncompressed 353,440
shmem/allocated 344,064
shmem/mapped 344,064
FF is not the problem.... (Score:3)
he problem is with programmers.
We all remember when every byte of ram used was worried about because RAM was a precious resource.
Now we have programmers who have drank the kool-aid of "Hey Ram is CHEAP and programer time is expensive.
Need another feature? Oh just compile is some humongous library that some other guy wrote that is so poorly written that not even the smartest linker can avoid linking in every dam line since every thing is interdependent on everything else.
This is objects gone insane. Need another property, another method, just pile it on, don't waste time refactoring the code so that you get what you need with the smallest footprint you can get.
Programmers need to re-boot their brains and start coding like memory is a precious commodity because it IS when everyone wants to have 100 tabs open in their browser, plus eclipse, plus gimp, plus this plus that plus the other and do all of this when re-compiling the entire Linux kernel.
Fix goddamn xulrunner/flash please! (Score:3)
Computer's ground to a halt?
Hard drive paging like a mofo?
Why yes, xulrunner and flash are using 90% of all physical memory. Yet again. And I have flash-control plugins that only start the flash apps I say to start.
Re: (Score:2)
That sounds about right, for the first week or so, if you only have 10 tabs open. Try 25-30 tabs, for a month, and it's much larger, especially if you've visted a few poorly-designed webpages. (Though to be fair, I find that poorly designed webpages have obvious markers, like one I recently timed at seventeen seconds(!) before I could scroll down... and if I leave it open in a tab, eventually crashes the browser (although that takes a couple of days)).
Re: (Score:3)
Out of curiosity, why so many tabs? Unless it's a page that will look different if you reload it, and you need to see what it was like the last time you looked, can't one just bookmark the page and open the bookmark instead of the tab? And if you already have a bookmark, just close it?
That way, the tabs won't hog memory and CPU.
Re: (Score:2)
What memeory problem? It uses 150MB when just browsing with a few tabs open, I've stress tested mine with 10 tabs of videos, pages and flash. It never passes 250MB.
Who even has that little RAM still, let alone uses firefox like that?
My browser has been open for about 2 days, I have around 20 tabs open (no video sites, though I'm sure a lot of the pages have Flash ads)
It's currently using 2200MB of virtual memory and 1100MB of real memory.
That doesn't include the 289MB/123MB used by the Flash plugin container.
Re: (Score:2)
10 tabs is kindergarten for serious browsers. The problem from what I can tell is with people who have A LOT of tabs open for a long time. Remember not everyone shuts down their computer each night, some people keep Firefox instances running for months.
Also even if it only uses 250MB that is unacceptable if that is more then it actually needs to use. If everyone followed the "people have heaps of memory so don't worry about minor memory leaks" then we would quickly find our abundant memory filling up. Memor
Re: (Score:2)
I'm running the latest build of Firefox on my late 2008 macbook pro with 4 gigs of ram. Right now, the app is taking 800megs while utilizing 15% of my cpu. I'm running Snow Leopard with five tabs open. One is a 404. One is an xml view. One is xbox live with the silverlight disabled. One is Slashdot with the ajax turned off. And the final one is an image was I viewing. I have only a couple of extensions installed and I never open a lot of tabs. Five or six is my sweet spot. Once firefox exceeds 1 g
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)