8 ms·

Memory Usage of Firefox with e10s Enabled

85 points by XzetaU8 11y ago

weaksauce 11y ago
I have noticed that the browser becomes more unresponsive with videos in tabs compared to single process Firefox. I enabled it to make my multi window, lots of tabs workflow smoother but it seems to have the opposite effect.
- ihsw 11y ago
  Which videos does this occur on? The e10s system is new and some plug-ins may not accommodate e10s yet.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  There was a known problem with video performance with e10s, though it was fixed two months ago (now Firefox 45 Dev Edition). The e10s sandbox inadvertently blocked hardware video decoding. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1217185 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1217185
  - weaksauce 11y ago
    ah, makes sense. I am on 44.0.1 right now. I'll try the dev edition, thanks!
    - lizzard 11y ago
      If you try it and run into a problem, do file a bug! Here's a bugzilla template link: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=__default__&product=Firefox&component=General&blocked=516752&short_desc=[e10s]%20&cc=cpeterson@mozilla.com https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=__default_...
bitmapbrother 11y ago
It's going to be interesting to see how the people, ignorant about the additional memory overhead required for a multi-process architecture, will respond to this. My guess is that they'll find another single process browser or revert back to the old version after they've thoroughly finished criticizing the new Firefox version for the increased memory bloat.
- nwah1 11y ago
  The relevant question is how well Firefox compares to competitors like Chrome (which uses multiple processes). Even despite this new overhead, it wouldn't be surprising if the numbers were very competitive.
- pmontra 11y ago
  There will be no more single process browsers left. However RAM is cheap and very useful in general. The more you have the faster your computer seems to run. Obviously if one has already hit the RAM limit of the motherboard and needs more, s/he's out of luck. I had a 4 GB laptop and couldn't expand it anymore. Then I bought one with 16 GB and I can expand it to 32 GB. I looked explicitly for that option, because I was pretty sure that sooner or later 16 GB wouldn't be enough. I rarely hit 12 GB at the moment.
  - bitmapbrother 11y ago
    I absolutely agree with you, but that doesn't stop the people complaining about Chrome memory bloat. The same people that consistently complain about Chrome will now have a new browser to complain about.
- sp332 11y ago
  You're probably right about the attitude, but you can disable this feature pretty easily.
  - bryanlarsen 11y ago
    After e10s is released, they should probably make a "low memory" build of Firefox available with this flag flipped.
arsa 11y ago
Primary reason I switched back from chrome to firefox couple of years ago is for memory usage actually - got really tired of browser eating all my ram (with every extension and tab adding more and more usage). And no, i rarely actually have enough free ram - it goes to better use. I hope firefox handles this better than chrome - any fundamental differences between sandboxing of every thread in chrome and what electrolysis is doing?
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > any fundamental differences between sandboxing of every thread in chrome and what electrolysis is doing? "Sandboxing every thread" isn't exactly what Chrome does. Chrome provides a separate process for each browser tab. That, of course, requires more memory (since processes cannot directly share memory). Firefox, on the other hand, uses a single process for the rendering for all tabs, but this process is separate from the main Firefox process. This means that the browser UI is still responsive even if one of the tabs is not responsive. Of course, actual profiling may yield different results due to other factors that also affect memory usage, but ceteris paribus, using only two processes for n tabs should consume less memory than using n processes for n tabs.
  - shabble 11y ago
    This is definitely not always the case in my experience, although that might be due to some addon (I have quite a few) hanging the main FF thread/process. I'd love to see a 'task manager' that can show CPU usage as well as memory use by individual tabs, because occasionally I see CPU use spike (noticed by laptop fans spinning up) and am reduced to closing random tabs in the hope it'll get better.
    - JohnBooty 11y ago
      > This is definitely not always the case in my experience, although that might be due to some addon (I have quite a few) hanging the main FF thread/process. My experience matches yours. I think chimeracoder means that's the way Firefox works if e10s is enabled, which wouldn't be true for you unless you've explicitly done so. (I haven't enabled it either)
mintplant 11y ago
I had to disable e10s because whenever I switched tabs the page would sometimes be replaced indefinitely by a white screen with a big loading indicator. Tried it again recently and the problem was still there, but less so. I get that multi-process is important, but I really hope Mozilla holds off on a wider release until performance and stability are fully ironed out.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  Can you file a bug report? It can't be fixed if Mozilla doesn't know about it.
- mbrubeck 11y ago
  Part of the problem is that e10s Firefox by default still uses just one UI process and one "content" process, shared by all tabs. So a web page can't cause the UI to hang, but it can cause all other web pages to hang. Curious testers can go to about:config and set "dom.ipc.processCount" higher than 1 to increase the number of content processes. I suggest trying this only in Firefox Developer Edition or Nightly, and not in your main browsing profile, since there are still some serious bugs and active development related to this configuration (so consider it a chance to test future improvements, rather than something that’s ready for regular use): http://bugzil.la/e10s-multi http://bugzil.la/e10s-multi
  - Scarbutt 11y ago
    When e10 becomes the default, will the number of content processes still default to 1?
    - swinglock 11y ago
      Yes, the conclusion of the link says so.
      - Excavator 11y ago
        Where? I don't see any such conclusion. Mind quoting the relevant bit?
c0l0 11y ago
It'd be interesting to see if one could trim down memory consumption by making Firefox use KSM[0] - on Linux, it's only a single madvise(2) call away. [0]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
- swinglock 11y ago
  That would be interesting. It's not free though, KSM can use considerable CPU time.
- kevincox 11y ago
  IIUC most of the shared pages would be common when the process is forked, I doubt there would be enough duplicate content created after the fork to be worth it.
suprgeek 11y ago
Linux Max - 872 MiB Windows Max - 1,108 MiB OSX Max - 1,694 MiB Something Funny is happening with OSX to spike the memory usage to those levels.
frik 11y ago
I can't wait to use a Servo (and Rust) based multi-process browser with a lean HTML5 UI. We wait for E10s since 2011 or so, and it still defaults to 1 process and is experimental. The whole XPCOM and XUL legacy API cruft do hurt Firefox. Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox originally started as a lean fork of the Mozilla Suite, with a lot of old cruft removed. Nowadays, I wish there would be a new leaner fork, that kisses the old cruft good bye and starts fresh with Servo and TraceMonkey. Maybe Mozilla should refocus all resources to Servo and Rust... All what people expect from Mozilla is a lean modern fast independent open source browser.
- ultramancool 11y ago
  > The whole XPCOM and XUL legacy API cruft do hurt Firefox. I'd argue the exact opposite - that "cruft" is the reason I still use Firefox. Extensions are so much better because they can truly have native features and have deep access to the browser. From the native look and feel of the LastPass extension of Firefox to basic stuff I need like sidetabs are only possible because of this deep "legacy" API rather than the extremely limited web based APIs everyone's pushing for these days. Kill XPCOM and XUL and you kill the only reason I still use Firefox. At least in the current state of things, nothing to say they won't improve the web-style extension APIs at some point but they're really not ready yet in my opinion, they've got a long way to go and leave a lot to be desired.
- jhatax 11y ago
  Unfortunately, any mention of creating a lean UI based on HTML5 creates a huge debate, nee a holy war, in the Firefox community because this is deemed to reduce the ability to extend the Firefox UI through extensions. Please refer to [1] for a protracted argument on why WebExtensions (or similar framework) are a step-back/inferior because they don't allow for extending the Firefox UI the way XUL-based extensions do. There are a number of power-users and vocal community members who believe that Firefox must have XUL-based extensions otherwise it becomes an inferior clone of Chrome (bollocks if you ask me). [1] http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2956625 http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2956625
- hackuser 11y ago
  > Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox originally started as a lean fork of the Mozilla Suite, with a lot of old cruft removed. Nowadays, I wish there would be a new leaner fork, that kisses the old cruft good bye and starts fresh with Servo and TraceMonkey. Let's not forget that Mozilla Suite was a fresh rewrite of Netscape, causing years of delay - and still resulting in lots of cruft. Code without cruft may only survive in laboratory environnments.

85 points by XzetaU8 11y ago

I have noticed that the browser becomes more unresponsive with videos in tabs compared to single process Firefox. I enabled it to make my multi window, lots of tabs workflow smoother but it seems to have the opposite effect.

ihsw 11y ago
Which videos does this occur on? The e10s system is new and some plug-ins may not accommodate e10s yet.
cpeterso 11y ago
There was a known problem with video performance with e10s, though it was fixed two months ago (now Firefox 45 Dev Edition). The e10s sandbox inadvertently blocked hardware video decoding. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1217185 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1217185
- weaksauce 11y ago
  ah, makes sense. I am on 44.0.1 right now. I'll try the dev edition, thanks!
  - lizzard 11y ago
    If you try it and run into a problem, do file a bug! Here's a bugzilla template link: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=__default__&product=Firefox&component=General&blocked=516752&short_desc=[e10s]%20&cc=cpeterson@mozilla.com https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=__default_...

bitmapbrother 11y ago

It's going to be interesting to see how the people, ignorant about the additional memory overhead required for a multi-process architecture, will respond to this. My guess is that they'll find another single process browser or revert back to the old version after they've thoroughly finished criticizing the new Firefox version for the increased memory bloat.

nwah1 11y ago
The relevant question is how well Firefox compares to competitors like Chrome (which uses multiple processes). Even despite this new overhead, it wouldn't be surprising if the numbers were very competitive.
pmontra 11y ago
There will be no more single process browsers left. However RAM is cheap and very useful in general. The more you have the faster your computer seems to run. Obviously if one has already hit the RAM limit of the motherboard and needs more, s/he's out of luck. I had a 4 GB laptop and couldn't expand it anymore. Then I bought one with 16 GB and I can expand it to 32 GB. I looked explicitly for that option, because I was pretty sure that sooner or later 16 GB wouldn't be enough. I rarely hit 12 GB at the moment.
- bitmapbrother 11y ago
  I absolutely agree with you, but that doesn't stop the people complaining about Chrome memory bloat. The same people that consistently complain about Chrome will now have a new browser to complain about.
sp332 11y ago
You're probably right about the attitude, but you can disable this feature pretty easily.
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  After e10s is released, they should probably make a "low memory" build of Firefox available with this flag flipped.

arsa 11y ago

Primary reason I switched back from chrome to firefox couple of years ago is for memory usage actually - got really tired of browser eating all my ram (with every extension and tab adding more and more usage). And no, i rarely actually have enough free ram - it goes to better use. I hope firefox handles this better than chrome - any fundamental differences between sandboxing of every thread in chrome and what electrolysis is doing?

chimeracoder 11y ago
> any fundamental differences between sandboxing of every thread in chrome and what electrolysis is doing? "Sandboxing every thread" isn't exactly what Chrome does. Chrome provides a separate process for each browser tab. That, of course, requires more memory (since processes cannot directly share memory). Firefox, on the other hand, uses a single process for the rendering for all tabs, but this process is separate from the main Firefox process. This means that the browser UI is still responsive even if one of the tabs is not responsive. Of course, actual profiling may yield different results due to other factors that also affect memory usage, but ceteris paribus, using only two processes for n tabs should consume less memory than using n processes for n tabs.
- shabble 11y ago
  This is definitely not always the case in my experience, although that might be due to some addon (I have quite a few) hanging the main FF thread/process. I'd love to see a 'task manager' that can show CPU usage as well as memory use by individual tabs, because occasionally I see CPU use spike (noticed by laptop fans spinning up) and am reduced to closing random tabs in the hope it'll get better.
  - JohnBooty 11y ago
    > This is definitely not always the case in my experience, although that might be due to some addon (I have quite a few) hanging the main FF thread/process. My experience matches yours. I think chimeracoder means that's the way Firefox works if e10s is enabled, which wouldn't be true for you unless you've explicitly done so. (I haven't enabled it either)

mintplant 11y ago

I had to disable e10s because whenever I switched tabs the page would sometimes be replaced indefinitely by a white screen with a big loading indicator. Tried it again recently and the problem was still there, but less so. I get that multi-process is important, but I really hope Mozilla holds off on a wider release until performance and stability are fully ironed out.

TD-Linux 11y ago
Can you file a bug report? It can't be fixed if Mozilla doesn't know about it.
mbrubeck 11y ago
Part of the problem is that e10s Firefox by default still uses just one UI process and one "content" process, shared by all tabs. So a web page can't cause the UI to hang, but it can cause all other web pages to hang. Curious testers can go to about:config and set "dom.ipc.processCount" higher than 1 to increase the number of content processes. I suggest trying this only in Firefox Developer Edition or Nightly, and not in your main browsing profile, since there are still some serious bugs and active development related to this configuration (so consider it a chance to test future improvements, rather than something that’s ready for regular use): http://bugzil.la/e10s-multi http://bugzil.la/e10s-multi
- Scarbutt 11y ago
  When e10 becomes the default, will the number of content processes still default to 1?
  - swinglock 11y ago
    Yes, the conclusion of the link says so.
    - Excavator 11y ago
      Where? I don't see any such conclusion. Mind quoting the relevant bit?

c0l0 11y ago

It'd be interesting to see if one could trim down memory consumption by making Firefox use KSM[0] - on Linux, it's only a single madvise(2) call away. [0]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt

swinglock 11y ago
That would be interesting. It's not free though, KSM can use considerable CPU time.
kevincox 11y ago
IIUC most of the shared pages would be common when the process is forked, I doubt there would be enough duplicate content created after the fork to be worth it.

suprgeek 11y ago

Linux Max - 872 MiB Windows Max - 1,108 MiB OSX Max - 1,694 MiB Something Funny is happening with OSX to spike the memory usage to those levels.

frik 11y ago

I can't wait to use a Servo (and Rust) based multi-process browser with a lean HTML5 UI. We wait for E10s since 2011 or so, and it still defaults to 1 process and is experimental. The whole XPCOM and XUL legacy API cruft do hurt Firefox. Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox originally started as a lean fork of the Mozilla Suite, with a lot of old cruft removed. Nowadays, I wish there would be a new leaner fork, that kisses the old cruft good bye and starts fresh with Servo and TraceMonkey. Maybe Mozilla should refocus all resources to Servo and Rust... All what people expect from Mozilla is a lean modern fast independent open source browser.

ultramancool 11y ago
> The whole XPCOM and XUL legacy API cruft do hurt Firefox. I'd argue the exact opposite - that "cruft" is the reason I still use Firefox. Extensions are so much better because they can truly have native features and have deep access to the browser. From the native look and feel of the LastPass extension of Firefox to basic stuff I need like sidetabs are only possible because of this deep "legacy" API rather than the extremely limited web based APIs everyone's pushing for these days. Kill XPCOM and XUL and you kill the only reason I still use Firefox. At least in the current state of things, nothing to say they won't improve the web-style extension APIs at some point but they're really not ready yet in my opinion, they've got a long way to go and leave a lot to be desired.
jhatax 11y ago
Unfortunately, any mention of creating a lean UI based on HTML5 creates a huge debate, nee a holy war, in the Firefox community because this is deemed to reduce the ability to extend the Firefox UI through extensions. Please refer to [1] for a protracted argument on why WebExtensions (or similar framework) are a step-back/inferior because they don't allow for extending the Firefox UI the way XUL-based extensions do. There are a number of power-users and vocal community members who believe that Firefox must have XUL-based extensions otherwise it becomes an inferior clone of Chrome (bollocks if you ask me). [1] http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2956625 http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2956625
hackuser 11y ago
> Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox originally started as a lean fork of the Mozilla Suite, with a lot of old cruft removed. Nowadays, I wish there would be a new leaner fork, that kisses the old cruft good bye and starts fresh with Servo and TraceMonkey. Let's not forget that Mozilla Suite was a fresh rewrite of Netscape, causing years of delay - and still resulting in lots of cruft. Code without cruft may only survive in laboratory environnments.