[geeks] Replacement MacBook question

[Eric Railine]

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 2:20 PM, Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
> On Sep 8, 2008, at 13:01 , Joshua Boyd wrote:
>> FF3 has proven to leak memory as well, just not as much.  I've seen it
>> taking 1.5 gigs, then when I killed it and reloaded with the same 30
>> tabs, it only took 300megs.
>
> I knew it still leaked, but so far I've not seen it do the balloon-leaking like earlier versions.

My experience is that it leaks at least as bad as FF2, but it will
eventually free up some memory if it sits idle - unlike FF2 which had
to be killed/restarted.  I've frequently seen the same thing where
restarting with the same tabs dramatically reduces the RAM usage.

> I frequently use a lot of tabs too.

I tend to use 40-110 tabs at a time; 70 is probably average.

> I wonder why FF will work on one setup and not another sometimes, when each often has similar browsing patterns?
>
>> Plus sometimes it just gets stupid, even when it isn't out of memory,
>> taking minutes to redraw the screen, or just doing nothing at all but
>> eaching CPU (visibly.  Obviously it is trying to something, but I have
>> no idea what).  Sometimes when it has trouble, it is presumably
>> thrashing, but other times it does this when the memory usage is really
>> low.
>
> I've not see this at all.

I see this every day.  FF2 or FF3 will eat an entire core at least
once per day (per machine); restarting with the same tabs (or not)
will result in low CPU usage for a period of time.  FF3, even more
than FF2 I think, also tends to randomly thrash the hard drive for no
apparent reason (even when RAM usage in general and for FF
specifically isn't very high, either when idle or in moderate use,
etc.).  I've seen it occur (either high CPU or I/O usage or both) with
as few as 6 open tabs (and only those tabs having been opened since FF
was started).

Pages with Flash definitely make all of FF's bad behavior worse, but
even avoiding Flash entirely doesn't cause it to behave *well*.  Heavy
AJAX/javascript pages also tend to kill it - I avoid GMail in FF, for
example.

> Could be related to which add-ons each of us uses.
>
> I did reduce a lot of my add-ons last year so maybe I just don't run enough to see this as much.

I run very few add-ons - 5 at most - and one of my FF installations
has no add-ons and shows no significant difference in behavior.

YMMV, etc.

-Eric