Slashdot Mirror
Notes On Reducing Firefox's Memory Consumption
Skuto writes "At yesterdays linux.conf.au Browser miniconference in Ballarat, Australia, Mozilla engineer Nicholas Nethercote gave a detailed presentation about the history of Firefox's memory consumption. The 37 slides-with-notes explain in gritty detail what caused Firefox 4's memory usage to be higher than expected, how many leaks and accidental memory use bugs were tracked down with Valgrind plugins, as well as the pitfalls of common memory allocation strategies. Current work is now focused on reducing the memory usage of popular add-ons such as AdBlock, GreaseMonkey and Firebug. Required reading for people working on large software projects, or those who missed that Firefox is now one of the most memory-efficient browsers in heavy usage."
The final link actually shows Firefox is one of the most memory inefficient browsers in heavy usage.
That depends on how you look at it. With one tab open it is comparatively poor, but with 40 tabs open it's very good.
I don't particularly think FFX has even close to the best performance, but those metrics are good. What's more important, good management with a low footprint or a high one? I have to disagree with you there.
It doesn't matter how much better Firefox is on its own at memory management, in practice many people using Firefox are using it because of the plugins (otherwise they'd be using some other browser), and the plugin developers may not be so good at memory management.
Actually, the presentation addressed that. They're going to add a notice to known bad add-ons at the Mozilla add-on page (social engineering), and also add a basic leak test to things done by the reviewers.
I want firefox to use up as much of it as it can to improve my browsing experience
RTFA. When FireFox has an off-by-one error in its JavaScript string concatenation code that causes it to allocate twice as much memory as it needs for JavaScript strings, it's not using memory to improve your browsing experience, it's just using memory. When FireFox is storing decompressed images in memory that never actually make it to the screen, it's not using memory to improve your browsing experience, it's just using memory.
Most of the techniques in TFA were of general interest to anyone working on a large project, not just to FireFox.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News