Firefox Working to Fix Memory Leaks

Christopher Blanc writes "Many Mozilla community members, including both volunteers and Mozilla Corporation employees, have been helping to reduce Firefox's memory usage and fix memory leak bugs lately. Hopefully, the result of this effort will be that Firefox 3 uses less memory than Firefox 2 did, especially after it has been used for several hours." Here's hoping. Frequent restarts of things on my computer make me furious. I can't imagine why anyone would tolerate such things.

Comments

about time!

[downix]

Too many apps nowadays just throw out RAM like it was yesterdays newspaper! It is sloppy coding, and I'm tired of having to put 2GB of RAM into a system just to surf the net nowadays.

Bloat in general

[pipatron]

I don't mind the memory. I have plenty of gigs even in my laptop. What I mind is the general slowness that I experience with Firefox, and that makes me use Opera on my laptop even though I would feel better using an open source browser.

Firefox != Internet

[realdodgeman]

Here's hoping. Frequent restarts of things on my computer make me furious. I can't imagine why anyone would tolerate such things.

Nobody forces you to use Firefox. You can use Opera, Konqueror, links or IE, or any other browser out there...

You're already tolerating it by using it at all...

[mgkimsal2]

I can't imagine why anyone would tolerate such things.

Well, my guess is that you *are* tolerating it, as are millions of others, simply because you're using it (either older versions of IE, or current versions of Firefox). Can't comment on IE7 cause I don't use it much, but IE6 rarely crashed for me. IE3-5.5, almost daily crashes.

5 years ago people people would constantly belittle IE users because it had frequent crashes, and pointed to the 'superior' Mozilla suite. Today, FF has morphed in to something which can't be used, with plugins, for more than a couple days max without needing to be reset. I add the caveat in there about 'with plugins' because I'm not sure I know many people who run a bare-metal Firefox. Most people use one or more extensions. This has been a huge marketing push for FF - "It's lean! Only use what you need! Get rid of 'bloat' - package everything in extensions!"

Putting things in extensions makes the base 'leaner' but has lead to a situation where there's no centralized testing for, or even acknowledgement of, memory leak bugs (and other bugs, but this is the obvious one). I still read comments from people who claim they never have leaks with FF (we'll see some on this thread no doubt). It's not that I don't believe them, but their usage patterns are likely different from mine. I have about 6 plugins that I love to use, and I like to keep my browser going. The idea that MSIE is more "stable" than FF for daily usage should remind people that resting on your laurels is not an option. What cut the mustard 5 years ago isn't gonna cut it any more.

Re:Here we go...

[savuporo]

There are very few "things that require a lot of memory", really. Most of the "things" you do in programming are tradeoffs, often between complexity of implementation, speed and memory requirements. There are usually off the shelf algorithms for each approach. Simplest solutions are often the most inefficient ones.
There is no reason why a minimal web browser could not be implemented, utilizing something like ~100kb of memory, in fact, i have seen the code to one. However, it wont be a) fast b) portable c) full featured d) very easy to understand

An act of balance

[SplatMan_DK]

I can certainly understand why people are tired of FF memory leaks. Being a FF user myself, with open browser windows and multiple tabs all through the day, I have seen what happens to FF after 4-5 hours of intense browsing. And don't even get me started on the PDF and Flash plugins!

Some would argue that the problem is sloppy coding, or poor encapsulation (a typical OO programmers point of view). But please remember, that even though modern browsers are GUI apps, they are coded much like low-level server processes or protocol stacks. Low-level programming using languages like C and C++ gives you more control and better performance, but at the expense of nicer development features like garbage collection and encapsulation.

Think about it. Would you accept a browser that rendered HTML flawlessly and with absolutely no memory leaks, but took more than a minute to render each page? I think not.

It's an act of balance, and the problem is not _always_ "sloppy coding". It is the increasing complexity of these apps, combined with user demands which push the development towards low-level development languages. From a realistic point of view, any app. written in low-level C with as many lines of codes as FF, is bound to have bugs and leaks. (perhaps except code controlling nuclear reactors and NASA satellites, but then the price of each line of code is also somewhat different).

We - the end users - are not without blame.

- Jesper

Re:C++ long-in-the-tooth?

[SilentChris]

If you can't code without hand-holding tools like automatic garbage collection, perhaps you belong in a different profession!

Or perhaps they're too busy thinking about clearly-defined objects, robust interfaces, clean documentation and the "big picture" then to worry about moving individual bytes around.

Likewise, I don't trust any artist using Flash today. They should clearly know how to code, in assembly, animation and transitions. Use of a timeline is for losers. The creative process should always be sacrificed for knowing the code inside out. /sarcasmoff

Re:C++ long-in-the-tooth?

[TemporalBeing]

Perhaps the culprit is C++. Languages with auto-garbage-collection or are database-engine-based tend to clean up automatically or cache to disk more effectively.

Actually, the big language culprits would be those with auto-garbage collection, etc. as they tend to have lazier programmers that don't "need" to manage their own resources, and in some cases even prohibit the programmer from being able to manage their resources.

C/C++ and similar languages, on the other hand, force the programmers to manage their resources. In those cases, the programmers would likely be just not designing their programs well, or employing bad resource management. Yes, managing resources can be hard - one project I worked on had to go through several months of testing to get the resources properly managed, and even then some of the resources were still a little uncontrollable due to legacy code or Windows APIs, but overall the thing was pretty stable and any memory leaks were mostly due to Windows APIs.

In either case, I can't tell you how many times I have heard (especially from Java programmers) something along the lines of the following: "RAM is cheap", "processors are getting faster", "computers will be ready for this when we deliver it", "hardware is cheaper than programmers"

No offense, but to rely on hardware always being getting faster, or the cost of adding more RAM always being cheaper, etc. is a bad premise to rely on. Already with multi-core processors we are seeing slower processors being combined into a single processor get the equivalent processing power of a faster processor (e.g. two 1.8 Ghz cores rated equally to a single 3 Ghz core); thus the premise breaks down. Also, I want to be able to do more with the faster processors and additional RAM, rather than simply do the same job I could do yesterday only in "better" software.

The real answer is doing your job right, and using the right tool - which is not necessarily the easiest tool to use either. We also need to get back to writing applications that have good, if not great, performance with minimal resource requirements (e.g. RAM and processor). If we're not going this at the API/library level - at the very least - then the programs and library/APIs that rely on that API/library level will have worse performance no matter what they do. But in either case it doesn't get done unless the programmers do their job, and use tools that allow them to do it.

Re:C++ long-in-the-tooth?

[Kristoph]

A computer, by definition, 'moves bytes around'. One might argue that this is the job of the computer (or language or VM or whatever) and not programmer but if you don't understand how / why and when the bytes are moved around then you are a poorer programmer for it.

C++ yields superior performance and memory usage, than higher level languages, in the hands of a skilled C++ programmer and it can lead to bloatware in the hands of a novice.

There is this old saying about blaming your tools for a poor job and it applies to software development too.

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Re:C++ long-in-the-tooth?

[i7dude]

Your argument is nonsense. If what you said held true, large scale applications should be able to be written is assembler. Without high level tools it wouldn't be feasible to create applications the scale we do today.


Wrong. What he is saying is that people who choose to use C/C++ for their applications should be competent enough to properly handle their own allocation and de-allocation of memory. If your abilities as a programmer preclude you from properly managing your application's memory then you need to look at alternatives that will take care of that for you.

There are plenty of languages out there that offer things like garbage collection. Developers need to make better choices about which tools they use to meet their needs, and also understand their limitations and work within those parameters.

dude.

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent post is completely correct. The main problem with Firefox and Mozilla in general is the XUL architecture. It is single-threaded such that JavaScript cannot run in multiple threads. And I've tried. It can't be done, Firefox will actually crash. (You can try with XPCOM, but it will crash.) I asked, and the solution given to me by the Firefox community (which isn't necessarily the developers, mind you) was to use Java from JavaScript, which is a non-starter if you want to write a cross-platform extension. (Not because Java isn't crossplatform, but because you can't guarantee that Firefox will be installed with a JVM.)

Firefox's problem is architectural and not one of garbage collection. Unfortunately part of their problem is garbage collection - it's due to their architecture, but they have at least four separate memory allocation schemes going:

1. Custom malloc/free implementation. (Yes, custom - not from libc.)
2. C++ new/delete operators, which for all I know may be overridden to use their malloc/free.
3. One of the first two with reference counting to decide when to free/delete.
4. JavaScript mark-and-sweep GC.

Dealing with this causes some truly insane hacks, like the absolutely insane DOM C++/JavaScript implementation. (They're C++ objects, exposed as JavaScript objects, using something that's like XPCOM but isn't due to the overhead XPCOM imposes. I really don't understand it.)

Ultimately, though, it's worse than all that. All this crap leaves the code completely opaque, and actively prevents contributors from contributing code without having to learn an insane amount of infrastructure decisions.

It makes a project that's supposed to be open source effectively closed off to only the "official" developers: almost open source in name only.

Re:C++ long-in-the-tooth?

[Hatta]

Likewise, I don't trust any artist using Flash today.

That's a good instinct. Never trust anyone using Flash.