[rescue] SGI tidbits

[Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366]

On Sun, Sep 29, 2002 at 10:59:26AM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Sunday, September 29, 2002, at 12:15 AM, Scott Newell wrote:
> >> couple of Emacs sessions can chew up lots of memory, too.  And let's 
> >> not
> >> forget that a single session of Mozilla munches 80MB on a TrueColor
> >> display.
> >
> > Who knew that rendering web pages was such a memory intensive 
> > operation?  ;-)
> >
> > But seriously, why on earth would it suck down 80MB?
> 
>    Much of Mozilla's user interface is compiled-in, run-time-interpreted 
> Javascript.  That seems (to me) to account for much of its unbelievably 
> shitty performance on even the fastest of machines.  It was a really, 
> really stupid decision.

That could well be part of the reason.

Another reason might be the way that X servers handle images.  If a
program gives it data to hold, it will hold it forever unless released
properly.  So if there is a bug in the image handling code it won't
free the images it no longer needs; sometimes even exiting the app
isn't enough - you have to restart the X server.

As well, if you have backing store turned on, Mozilla will happily use
it.

Cordially
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