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

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...

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.

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.