5 ms·

What's actually surprising is that it took them this many years to get it fixed. Memory fragmentation is just as bad as memory leaks. To the user, the RAM being

• ootachi 15y ago
  See my comment below; Mozilla has been well aware of memory fragmentation for years and has been constantly working to decrease it.
  • iam 15y ago
    I remember that blog post like it was yesterday. I guess the Mozilla source code is such a gargantuan beast at this point that it really does take years to get significant improvements into it? Could explain their recent flurries of rewriting the javascript jits.
    • ootachi 15y ago
      Yes, Mozilla source code is huge (5.2 million lines [1]). But keep in mind that all browsers are roughly that big (compare Chrome, at 4.8 million lines [2]). [1]: https://www.ohloh.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest https://www.ohloh.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest [2]: http://www.ohloh.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest http://www.ohloh.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest
      • hollerith 15y ago
        Yes, I have to laugh every time a PHB refers to a web browser as a "thin" client.
        • hollerith 15y ago
          Incidentally, does anyone know how many source lines of code iOS is? How about the software distributed on the OS X install disk minus hardware drivers?
      • nikcub 15y ago
        this is the #1 reason why I sought out a Firefox alternative a long time ago. I like to have a lot of tabs open, and to almost never close or restart the browser. Firefox was, and to an extent still is, unusable with that type of usage pattern. I hope they get it sorted out because it is the main blocker to getting a lot of the early adopter crowd who have switched to chrome back onto Firefox.
        • saulrh 15y ago
          Maybe you have a different use case than I do; my Chrome instance usually uses about 30% more memory than Firefox despite having a quarter as many tabs open.
          • nikcub 15y ago
            OS X? I have 50+ tabs open atm and it is taking up 690MB in total. Chrome is also good with swaping/paging tabs that are in the background. Also, I have flash disabled, and use 3 separate builds of chrome on OS X to separate web accounts, dev instances and anonymous browsing
            • saulrh 15y ago
              Win7. Between eight and ten tabs open, one open to Grooveshark. Everything gets refreshed every eight hours or so. Firefox usually has anywhere between five and a hundred tabs open. Both get rebooted about once every three days for updates. Chrome is at 400MB, FF is currently at 300.
              • nikcub 15y ago
                my own experience was that chrome on windows is the best/fastest browser experience available atm, but I don't use it often. have you tried chrome canary or webkit/safari? you seem to have a weird problem - it might be down to a plugin or extension, so I would disable them all and re-enable one-by-one.
                • 15y ago
• nnethercote 15y ago
  A colleague of mine said "eternal vigilance is the price of low memory usage". Firefox's memory behaviour has varied over the years. FF3.6 was fairly good. FF4 wasn't good. FF5 is a bit better. FF7 is looking like it will be much better. You can get Nightly builds of FF7 now (nightly.mozilla.org), and you'll be able to get Aurora builds of it in a couple of days.
• bzbarsky 15y ago
  This particular fragmentation issue was introduced sometime around November 2010. So it took about 5 months to find and a bit of time to fix. > Memory fragmentation is just as bad as memory leaks. Indeed.
  • anygregor 15y ago
    I don't think so. This bug has been around since the introduction of our current chunk allocation model. So many many years.
    • bzbarsky 15y ago
      I thought it was introduced with compartments... but perhaps not.