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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."
I use other browsers for development, but only Firefox to browse, it's the only browser that I feel is actively protecting my privacy.
Any other opinions on that?
I have 8gb of memory on my main computer. I want firefox to use up as much of it as it can to improve my browsing experience. On my netbook, I have 1, I want it to sip as little as it can. There should be an easy way to tell the browser how much memory I want used for certain tasks such as caching and whatnot. Addons should have their own seperate allocation, and each individual addon should be configurable for how much memory it can use.
Free / Open source software is about choices to run things how you want to. With that said, I don't have much room to complain because I've never contributed code to FF.
My main point though, is that screaming "THE RAM USAGE IS TOO HIGH" is not effective. I have a lot of ram, and I want it to be used, just not wasted; and I want more control over it.
In my experience Firefox (minus plugins etc) has leaked/used less memory than Google Chrome.
BUT, when a plugin/page starts leaking lots of memory the difference is with Google Chrome you can close the offending tab/window and the memory is freed up. You don't lose your sessions, don't lose your place on other tabs/windows. You can even reopen the page (esp if the page just slowly uses more and more memory).
In contrast with Firefox you often have to close the entire browser to free up the memory. And IMO that's Firefox's biggest problem when it comes to memory.
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.
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.
Yeah, most of the improvements were in the last 4-6 months.
Anyone else get tired of this... "blah blah, my favourite open source browser wasn't competitive with the commercial product by an ad agency that records every keystroke I type in the URL bar a long time ago, possibly due to some addons I was running, so I just completely gave up on it and whenever a story comes up on how it has improved, I just state how it sucked at some time in the past and I'll never try it again"?
I use FF because it is much more configurable (about:config has entries for more than any other browser), it also has more plug ins, and those plug ins it does have tend to be more effective for just about everything.
I also don't like Google Chrome calling home all the time (uninstalled). I also have IE9 and Opera installed.
Speed issues are moot outside of benchmarks these days (unless you are running IE7 on a netbook). IMO it is pure placebo effect to say one browser is faster than another in regular browsing on a modern computer.
Windows users should investigate the Pale Moon browser over at www.palemoon.org. Firefox optimized and without all the gunk.
Kriston
with over 340 open tabs
I think it's time for PybusJ to admit he has a pr0n problem...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
See page 27 of the PDF. He explains that the allocator, jemalloc, rounds up some allocation requests to easier to handle size. He calls this wastage "slop". Then look at the final point on that page - in order to reduce slop, always allocate a power of two sized block, as those never have slop.
So in order to stop the allocator wasting memory by using up more memory than requested, we're supposed to ask for more memory than we need?
What's to stop us from changing a 1025-byte allocation to 1024 bytes, rather than 2048 bytes, as you assume? There's no reason we need round up, and indeed we usually don't.
But note that even when we do round up, it's still an improvement: The slop is rarely usable memory -- you can't use it without first calling malloc_usable_size to realize that you have any slop. But if we round 1025 up to 2048 bytes, now we have almost double the amount of memory to play with. We pay 2048 bytes either way, but when we round up, we get to use all the memory we allocated.
I have never understood why memory leaks are so problematic to find. When I was programming in C long ago and had memory leaks, I simply created my own wrappers for malloc and free that stored where in the source code it was being called from, then at the end of the program I could simply check this list and it would display all the memory that had not been released and the corresponding line in the source where malloc was called.
Both machines run FF 3.6 because I keep reading that later versions have worse memory use and UI performance characteristics.
... people say that 3.6 is more responsive (especially on older HW) than the newer versions.
Those people are wrong. Newer versions of Firefox are *much* faster and use less memory. In fact, lowering memory usage became a priority right about the time you stopped upgrading. Ironic, eh?