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Is it the same old fallacy that consumed memory is somehow bad? What if they use it for efficient caching?
by Tichy 15y ago
Is it the same old fallacy that consumed memory is somehow bad? What if they use it for efficient caching?
- hackermom 15y agoBy now I think it's well-known to every Firefox user that in the case of Firefox, the memory used is mostly leakage.
- rpearl 15y agoYes, absolutely. These measurements in the linked article are just a complete and utter lie. Edit: The sentence above is sarcastic. Firefox has had better memory usage than its competitors for a while now, despite the belief that it is leaky.
- nnethercote 15y agoEvidence, please.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sp332 15y agoI have already found one case in Firefox where this is true. FF will load the image data in background tabs, but it won't decode it (e.g. render a JPG) until you switch to that tab. I may be nitpicking but the extra half-second or so bothers me like texture pop-in in a game. So I go to about:config and set image.mem.decodeondraw and image.mem.discardable to false.
- nnethercote 15y agoTrade-offs exist! How astonishing. From https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink: "MemShrink is a project that aims to reduce Firefox's memory consumption. There are three potential benefits. 1. Speed. Firefox will be faster due to less cache pressure, less paging, and fewer/smaller GC and CC pauses. Changes that reduce memory consumption but make Firefox slower are not desirable. 2. Stability. Firefox will suffer fewer aborts/crashes due to virtual or physical memory exhaustion. The former is mostly a problem on 32-bit Windows builds with a 2GB or 4GB virtual memory limit, the latter is mostly a problem on mobile devices that lack swap space. 3. Reputation. Fewer people will complain that Firefox is a memory hog and that Mozilla ignores memory usage."
- Tichy 15y agoI am not a specialist on that stuff, but I note the "will". If they have launched and noticed actual improvements, I'll be interested.
- ssheth 15y agonnethercote on the other hand is the "specialist" as he is in charge of the MemShrink project itself... I would trust him on this stuff.
- Tichy 15y agoOK, but the developers of Mozilla are specialists, too. Why not trust them? Or is nnethercote part of the Mozilla dev team? MemShrink will hopefully just be merged into the core?
- int3 15y agoHe's part of the Mozilla dev team. Memshrink isn't a branch that's waiting to get merged, but an ongoing program to reduce overall memory usage.
- nnethercote 15y agoI'm a Mozilla employee and started MemShrink. I also write about it regularly: http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/category/memshrink/ http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/category/memshrink/. MemShrink has been running since June 2011 and there have been many improvements in Firefox's memory consumption since then; these have shown up in Firefox 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11.