[geeks] Replacement MacBook question

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Sep 8, 2008, at 15:35 , Eric Railine wrote:

> 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.

Running FF2 for a few days, it would hit 800MB or more resident memory.

Running FF3 for two weeks now, I'm still only at 260MB resident.

This is on MacOS.

I've not run FF3 on Linux.

It seems OK on Windows, but I never run Windows for more than a few  
hours lately.

Of course, maybe I've just been lucky so far.

One thing that has helped me lately is I use RSS more often to avoid  
having to run though a bunch of browser pages.  Makes catching up on  
sites I like or need to check much easier.

>> I frequently use a lot of tabs too.
>
> I tend to use 40-110 tabs at a time; 70 is probably average.

My usage goes up and down quite a bit.

The point is though, FF3 is dramatically less piggy than FF2 under the  
same load, at least it is for me.

> 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).

What OS is this?

Do your tabs have a lot of Flash or active JS code running?

"Web 2.0" apps have greatly increased load in many cases.

If you think about it: the OS sees the browser as always active, so it  
tends to not put it to sleep or page it out to disk.

Local apps that are idle... the OS can handle them much better.

That's one reason why Google is making Chrome treat each tab as a  
separate process.  It should allow your local OS to better schedule  
browser tasks.

In any case, I generally don't see this until I really push a lot of  
windows open.

IMHO, the biggest problem is just that running apps in a browser is  
inefficient.  It keeps your local OS from being able to properly  
manage things, and it leaves a ton of stuff actively running that you  
really are not using.

All these people putting Flash and other programs on their pages  
aren't thinking about the impact of all that crap running on a dozen  
pages on one machine.

> 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.

Well, see above: Web 2.0 is horribly inefficient.


-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com