[geeks] And The Linux Weenies Wonder Why They Aren't Mainstream...`

Charles Shannon Hendrix shannon at widomaker.com
Sun Mar 5 11:04:20 CST 2006


Sat, 04 Mar 2006 @ 01:17 -0600, Micah R Ledbetter said:

> > I have a 2.0GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM, and it is blindly stupid that
> > surfing the web and running a couple of office applications can kill
> > my machine.
> 
> I'm pretty far off topic here, but Firefox isn't *that* bad (for me).  

I regularly see it run over 200MB.

The primary problem is that when it does this, it starts getting slow to
respond to the user, and you get a lot of latency.

Several people I know have this problem, so it isn't just me. It probably
depends on what your usage pattern is.

I find it gets really bad when doing WWW programming, where you are doing a
lot of page loads in a short period of time.

I've traced Firefox, and it frequently allocates memory that I never see it
release.

> The CPU on my work box is slower than that, and I used to have half  
> the RAM. I can surf the web (and I keep a seriously large amount of  
> tabs open while doing so), burn a DVD, chat on IRC, use Word, and  
> almost anything else.

I do too, but Firefox in particular slows down so much I have to kill it and
restart.

Otherwise, my swap eats the waste and I can generally just keep going.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["If you tell the truth, you don't have to
remember anything" -- Mark Twain]



More information about the geeks mailing list