[SLL] Laughing down Firefox today at my work...

[Glenn Stone]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 09:45:05PM -0500, Jesse Keating wrote:
>It's just that they have to allocate memory over and over again for
>lots of small things like fonts and images that come from the web.
>This can lead to a lot of fragmentation in the allocator provided by
>the system, and Window's is particularly bad.

Linux's seems some better, particularly in later versions of Fx2 I'm seeing
when I close a window it's actually deallocating RAM.  Flash does seem to
eat a lot (and it doesn't close things like the sound device properly when
the containing tab closes).  

I usually end up restarting Fx2 about once a week... although on my workbox
(which is only Fx 1.5.8) where I'm not running Flash all the time I can go
two or three weeks without having to restart.

Oh, and one more thing?  TabMixPlus's session manager for the win.  That
makes it decidedly less annoying (and darn near painless) to have to
restart, even if it's kill -9.  And, got a whole buttload of tabs whose
content you want to remember but it's eating your box alive?  Move them to
their own window, save'em off, and kill the window.  Winner!  

First thing I do when customizing a new desktop, is make sure Firefox is
there, and then go grab AdBlockPlus, Filterset.G Updater, and TabMixPlus.
(Then go set FocusFollowsMouse...)  

>That said, in Firefox 3 a /ton/ of work is being put in to do
>allocations differently as to not trigger these types of scenarios.

Glad to hear it's finally getting addressed.  As I said, it's been a lot
less annoying with Fx2, but it would be nice for it to be Fixed Once And For
All... 

>http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak and http://www.squarefree.com/2007/09/20/firefox-memory-usage-and-memory-leak-news/ would be particularly helpful in discussions with the naysayers.

Good stuff.  Thanks, Jesse.

-- Glenn