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This incident should serve as a very good lesson to those in the Firefox community who often claim that memory and performance problems don't exist, even after
by Pacabel 12y ago
This incident should serve as a very good lesson to those in the Firefox community who often claim that memory and performance problems don't exist, even after numerous users report experiencing such problems.
Such memory and CPU consumption problems are often blamed on vague "third-party extensions", even when they happen with fresh installations on systems that have never before had Firefox installed. Or they're otherwise blamed on the user somehow, even when the user is engaging in a perfectly reasonable workflow.
And even if the problems don't happen on one system, they very well could be happening on another system, as this very incident shows quite well.
This part of the article is particularly relevant: "Shortly after that, while on a plane I tried pdf.js on my Mac laptop. I was horrified to find that memory usage was much higher than on the Linux desktop machine on which I had done my optimizations. The first document I measured made Firefox’s RSS (resident set size, a.k.a. physical memory usage) peak at over 1,000 MiB. The corresponding number on my Linux desktop had been 400 MiB!"
This matches very well with what so many Firefox users describe as happening to them. The memory consumption ends up skyrocketing to well above what it reasonably should be. Gigabytes of memory are unjustifiably consumed.
Perhaps now instead of ridiculing or ignoring people who report such issues, those in the Firefox community will perhaps do the responsible thing and take them seriously. It should be very obvious now that memory consumption problems can happen on one system, while not happening on another.
- nnethercote 12y agoHi, Pacabel! Can you give specific examples of this ridicule? While I don't claim that everything is perfect, my experience is that for the past few years Mozilla has taken Firefox performance issues extremely seriously. For example, I started a project called MemShrink exactly three years ago to reduce Firefox's memory consumption. In fact, I even wrote a blog post today that discussed the major improvements from the past year, and what areas we still fall short on: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/06/16/memshrinks-3rd-birthday/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/06/16/memshrinks-3.... And if you want more detail about this particular effort, you can read the 70+ status reports I've written in those three years here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink. And since you mentions extensions, you could also read about how we solved the vast majority of the memory leaks that involved extensions here: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/07/19/firefox-15-plugs-the-add-on-leaks/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/07/19/firefox-15-p.... That was almost two years ago. As for pdf.js, here's the bug I filed last year about it using too much memory: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=881974 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=881974. The title of the bug is "pdf.js uses too much memory". No ridicule or ignoring the problem there. MemShrink is just one of numerous performance-related projects that have been undertaken at Mozilla over the past few years. I'm sure with a little Googling you could find out about some of the others.