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Firefox Working to Fix Memory Leaks

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the important-but-boring-work dept.

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.

3 of 555 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And on three... by Seumas · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, from what I understood over the last year "THERE IS NO MEMORY PROBLEM".

    Every time someone mentions memory issues, the responses are either that it's supposed to consume a gigabyte of ram so that it speeds up the back button or that "there is no memory issue".

    Strange, now, that there are suddenly people paying attention to specifically attacking memory use issues that supposedly don't exist.

  2. Re:C++ long-in-the-tooth? by suv4x4 · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    Firefox's problem is architectural and not one of garbage collection.

    XUL is inherently single-threaded and JavaScript based. Try out any XUL application out there and you'll see how you get the same poor performance, speed and resource usage as with Firefox (try Miro Player and Joost).

    The Firefox developers are literally throwing out more C code with every release, replacing it with JavaScript code.

    Leaks (in the classical sense) aren't what's causing Firefox's abysmal performance, and this is why Firefox 2 performs worse than Firefox 1.5, despite one of the "features" of Firefox 2 was supposedly plenty of fixed memory leaks.

    Actually I'm pretty sure they're in denial as to the cause of their problems. Announcing they're working on fixing "memory leaks" just supports their ability to continue their delusion.

  3. Re:Mod parent up by BZ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > 1. Custom malloc/free implementation. (Yes, custom - not from libc.)

    Uh... No. There are some arena allocators in use in the codebase for very specific tasks, but there is no custom malloc/free.

    > They're C++ objects, exposed as JavaScript objects, using something that's like XPCOM but isn't

    Actually, to be exposed to JS in Gecko something more or less has to be an XPCOM object at the moment. Then the XPConnect layer handles the glue between JS and C++.

    > It makes a project that's supposed to be open source effectively closed off to only the
    > "official" developers

    As someone who got into this project without being in any way "official", I beg to differ! ;)