5 ms·

I'm using 55 and am really impressed. Startup times have improved. A nice UI feature is in Settings -> General -> Performance. I still notice, compared to Chr

I'm using 55 and am really impressed. Startup times have improved. A nice UI feature is in Settings -> General -> Performance. I still notice, compared to Chrome, that if I use 1 content process, no matter how many tabs I have open, or how many I have closed, the process just grows and grows over time. In contrast, Chrome may use more memory but its size dependably follows the number of tabs open / closed. Even though FF is recommending 1 Content Process now as default on my low spec machine, I have set it to 2 to increase the likelihood that one of those processes has no tabs, and gets destroyed, along with whatever garbage accumulates. I think Mozilla could do more research on migrating tabs to processes to minimize memory usage, and accumulated garbage from the runtime that doesn't seem to be collected. Perhaps after a certain threshold (time, size) content processes should be destroyed and tabs migrated to a new one.

ronjouch 9y ago
The default number of content processes is already 4 in Nightly (57), they're just rolling it progressively in case things break :)
- 482794793792894 9y ago
  No, the number of processes is already at its intended value for the near future, as of Firefox 54. The default just varies for different hardware. If you look in the Firefox settings under General -> Performance, then it says there that it's optimized for your hardware, so I'm pretty sure that's the case and not just marketing fluff. What I'm not entirely sure of, is how it's decided how many processes it uses. I think it's either largely dependent on the number of CPU cores or just straight-up that value. And then the vast majority of people has a quad-core, which is why it might seem like 4 is the default for everyone.
  - ronjouch 9y ago
    Thanks, you must be right about the "optimized for your hardware", didn't know about that feature. That being said, it's not just about CPU cores, there is some fixed number of content processes, and it was increased during the last recent months; when e10s was in infancy it was set to 1, then bumped a few times. Source: developers blogposts, and https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_processes#Release_Plan https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_proce... mentions Fx 55 is at 4 and expirements at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Experiments#List_of_e10s-multi_experiments https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Experiments#List_of_e1... mention 8
karolg 9y ago
I use e10s for about a year and I have processCount set to 4. It worked almost flawlessly and content process crashed maybe 1-2 times in this time. I enabled "Recommended performance settings" and Firefox changed processCount to 1. I have dual-core (4-thread) CPU so I think they don't use number of cores as base for this setting but make some A/B testing on users. Check in about:config 'e10s.rollout.cohort' and 'extensions.e10s' and you will see that every user is put in some kind of testing 'bucket'.

ronjouch 9y ago

The default number of content processes is already 4 in Nightly (57), they're just rolling it progressively in case things break :)

482794793792894 9y ago
No, the number of processes is already at its intended value for the near future, as of Firefox 54. The default just varies for different hardware. If you look in the Firefox settings under General -> Performance, then it says there that it's optimized for your hardware, so I'm pretty sure that's the case and not just marketing fluff. What I'm not entirely sure of, is how it's decided how many processes it uses. I think it's either largely dependent on the number of CPU cores or just straight-up that value. And then the vast majority of people has a quad-core, which is why it might seem like 4 is the default for everyone.
- ronjouch 9y ago
  Thanks, you must be right about the "optimized for your hardware", didn't know about that feature. That being said, it's not just about CPU cores, there is some fixed number of content processes, and it was increased during the last recent months; when e10s was in infancy it was set to 1, then bumped a few times. Source: developers blogposts, and https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_processes#Release_Plan https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_proce... mentions Fx 55 is at 4 and expirements at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Experiments#List_of_e10s-multi_experiments https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Experiments#List_of_e1... mention 8

karolg 9y ago

I use e10s for about a year and I have processCount set to 4. It worked almost flawlessly and content process crashed maybe 1-2 times in this time. I enabled "Recommended performance settings" and Firefox changed processCount to 1. I have dual-core (4-thread) CPU so I think they don't use number of cores as base for this setting but make some A/B testing on users. Check in about:config 'e10s.rollout.cohort' and 'extensions.e10s' and you will see that every user is put in some kind of testing 'bucket'.