I have no problems with an application using a lot of memory. I have problems with it failing to give that memory back to the system when it is no longer needed. It is clear that after all but one of the tabs are closed, Firefox doesn't need to keep 70MB of memory. The fact that it keeps that memory around makes it a huge memory hog.
I don't have Opera installed, and don't have IE7 with tabs, so I haven't tested either of them in a similar environment. If I found that they also kept large chunks of memory when they didn't need it, I would call them memory hogs too.
Set browser.cache.memory.capacity to 0
Set browser.cache.memory.enable to false
Set config.trim_on_minimize to true
Disabled all plugins, and closed firefox.
Set all the settings suggested by the article you pointed to. Disabled all plugins.
Open to Google/Firefox start page: 24M (old 24M)
Reply to slashdot post: 30M (old 32M)
second tab to cnn: 38M (old 34M)
58 more tabs: 102M (old 94M)
Closing everything but slashdot: 58M (old 70M)
second tab to lj: 58M (old 74M)
minimize Firefox: 4M (no old value)
restore Firefox: 12M (no old value)
So, this is definitely an improvement (and hopefully won't change too much after I enable all my plugins again). However, if Firefox can be cut down to 12M after I minimize and restore it, why won't it just give up that memory earlier? The minimize/restore trick is reported to only work on Windows boxes, too, so any *nix user should expect to give up a large chunk of their system memory if they want to keep Firefox running for any length of time on their nice stable system.
It's not quite a memory leak anymore for me since it gets fixed after I minimize it, but Firefox definitely counts as a huge memory hog, and I shouldn't have to minimize and restore to get it to give some of that memory back to the system.
Note: numbers above off by a factor of 1000. My bad - dratted thing reports it as 76,000, but it means 76,000K. So replace K with M above.
My problem is that it's a cache which NEVER gets returned to the OS. I kept the browser window open after the previous experiment, and currently have 4 tabs open - it's back up to almost 80M, and doesn't seem to be dropping below 70M even when I drop back down to one tab. If it's a cache, then there needs to be some way to configure it to not eat up a large chunk of my RAM; I already set Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Cache to use a 20M cache.
I don't mind it using all my RAM when I open lots of tabs, but there needs to be a way to get it to drop back down to something reasonable.
Has the memory leak really gone away? It was 24K when I opened (with the google/firefox start page), 32K after going to slashdot.org, reading the firefox discussion, and clicking reply to your post. Opening a second tab, going to cnn.com, and clicking through half a dozen pages gets it up to 34K. Opening 58 more tabs, some of which result in 404 or timeouts, gets it up to 94K. Closing everything but the original slashdot tab drops it to 70K. Opening a second tab and reading my livejournal friends page sends it back up to 74K.
That's an improvement, but it's still not fixed. I can understand the amount of memory used when I open lots of tabs, but it should be freed when I close them all again.
When I finished up undergrad, I didn't want to spend 4-6 years of my life on a PhD, but I also wanted to take more classes in some specific topics, and those classes weren't available at the (really good) small engineering college I'd gone to.
I ended up doing a 1 year M.Eng. program at a large university. This gave me the opportunity to take graduate-level courses from very good professors in the areas I was interested in, and I was exposed to a lot of topics which had only been mentioned in passing in undergrad.
I found a job with someone one of the professors I'd taken a class from put me in touch with, and having the M.Eng. degree has let me start with a higher position, and work on more interesting projects.
So I'd say that a M.Eng./M.S. is worth it if there's a specific area you'd like to learn more in. It will also give you a chance to get to know professors who can help you find a good job, and give your resume a boost over someone who only has a B.S.
I'm running the latest release of firefox with a couple extensions, and there's definitely a memory leak somewhere. After about 4 hours of use, it's up to 97 MB of memory, which leads to really crummy performance, especially when I suspend and restart my laptop. This is running XP Pro with the latest set of patches.
If IE had tabs, I might just switch back, because waiting for 3 minutes to get firefox to respond really, really sucks.
One problem I see is that an auction site would require a lot more supervision than a search engine, and introduce all sorts of potential lawsuits. Think about just how frequently you hear of people auctioning illegal objects, or fake auctions. Now think about the number of people you have to have constantly checking up on these things. Remember, if Google screws this up by annoying customers, then those customers won't want to use other Google products, either.
Most systems now limit the number of processes and threads on a per-user basis, meaning that your fork bomb eats up your space, but won't bring the entire system down.
My problem with offshore call centers is that when I give someone large amounts of money for a warranty, including tech support, on a product, I expect to get help when I call their support line, or send an email to tech support. I do not think it's acceptable when the person on the other end of the conversation fails to understand English well enough to help me with my problem. I'm not looking for a deep understanding of computers, but someone who understands that my computer is broken, needs to be serviced, and can actually arrange for it to be picked up, serviced, and dropped off.
The problem is that in my experience, the people in offshore call centers (thick accent, a phone line with way too much static, misspelling basic english words, strange grammar in emails) can't handle this. I end up spending three days to get someone to pick up my computer, and then only find out that it's been shipped back to California (original address where I purchased it) instead of New York (where they picked it up!) when, on my 4th attempt at calling, I get someone who speaks English without an accent, and understands what I'm asking him.
Because it's not really stable enough yet for an environement which wants no unscheduled downtime, at least as a server. It's UI also has some problems from a server admin's point of view.
I'll freely admit that I'm an irregular case. At the same time, I don't think the answer to the problem of misbehaving teenagers is to prevent all teenagers from doing things. I still recall far too many rules which prevented me from doing perfectly reasonable things when I was a teenager, and don't want to see teenagers stuck with even more in 10 years.
Ah, generalizations. I'm no longer a teenager, but was fairly reccently.
Your wonderful restrictions on who can ride in a car with a teenager driving? One of those would have prevented me from driving my two younger sisters anywhere and helping out my mom, the other from giving the neighbor across the street a ride to school with me, which saved her about 20 minutes outside in extremely cold and windy weather.
I was actually driving the nicer of the two cars we had most of the time, and it was well taken care of and quite safe.
I had tried slamming on the brakes (in a safe situation) several times, and checked to see how well they responded when I pulled out onto a snowy or otherwise suspicious looking road.
The problem with legal restrictions on what teenage drivers can do is that they prevent perfectly good drivers from driving in reasonable situations, and most of the teenagers who haven't been taught to drive, or are driving unsafely, don't obey them anyho.
Actually, it makes a lot of sense, although not from a strictly economic standpoint. Food is one of the resources a country *has* to have, and you don't want to be stuck relying on another country for food when a war breaks out, even though it's cheaper to purchase food from the other country the rest of the time. Even if you keep a stockpile of food on hand, it's rather difficult to replace a parking lot or strip mall with a field of wheat.
Hell, I'd treat you like an unwelcome guest on my pc. I am running Windows XP, but I patch it on a regular basis, and actually pay some attention to security. You wouldn't be able to get on it without me there, and I'm not going to trust a school's computer support to run random software I don't know on my machine.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no problems with an application using a lot of memory. I have problems with it failing to give that memory back to the system when it is no longer needed. It is clear that after all but one of the tabs are closed, Firefox doesn't need to keep 70MB of memory. The fact that it keeps that memory around makes it a huge memory hog.
I don't have Opera installed, and don't have IE7 with tabs, so I haven't tested either of them in a similar environment. If I found that they also kept large chunks of memory when they didn't need it, I would call them memory hogs too.
Set browser.cache.memory.capacity to 0 Set browser.cache.memory.enable to false Set config.trim_on_minimize to true Disabled all plugins, and closed firefox. Set all the settings suggested by the article you pointed to. Disabled all plugins. Open to Google/Firefox start page: 24M (old 24M) Reply to slashdot post: 30M (old 32M) second tab to cnn: 38M (old 34M) 58 more tabs: 102M (old 94M) Closing everything but slashdot: 58M (old 70M) second tab to lj: 58M (old 74M) minimize Firefox: 4M (no old value) restore Firefox: 12M (no old value) So, this is definitely an improvement (and hopefully won't change too much after I enable all my plugins again). However, if Firefox can be cut down to 12M after I minimize and restore it, why won't it just give up that memory earlier? The minimize/restore trick is reported to only work on Windows boxes, too, so any *nix user should expect to give up a large chunk of their system memory if they want to keep Firefox running for any length of time on their nice stable system. It's not quite a memory leak anymore for me since it gets fixed after I minimize it, but Firefox definitely counts as a huge memory hog, and I shouldn't have to minimize and restore to get it to give some of that memory back to the system.
Note: numbers above off by a factor of 1000. My bad - dratted thing reports it as 76,000, but it means 76,000K. So replace K with M above.
My problem is that it's a cache which NEVER gets returned to the OS. I kept the browser window open after the previous experiment, and currently have 4 tabs open - it's back up to almost 80M, and doesn't seem to be dropping below 70M even when I drop back down to one tab. If it's a cache, then there needs to be some way to configure it to not eat up a large chunk of my RAM; I already set Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Cache to use a 20M cache.
I don't mind it using all my RAM when I open lots of tabs, but there needs to be a way to get it to drop back down to something reasonable.
Ah, yes, off by a factor of 1000. My bad - dratted thing reports it as 76,000, but it means 76,000K. So replace K with M above.
Has the memory leak really gone away? It was 24K when I opened (with the google/firefox start page), 32K after going to slashdot.org, reading the firefox discussion, and clicking reply to your post. Opening a second tab, going to cnn.com, and clicking through half a dozen pages gets it up to 34K. Opening 58 more tabs, some of which result in 404 or timeouts, gets it up to 94K. Closing everything but the original slashdot tab drops it to 70K. Opening a second tab and reading my livejournal friends page sends it back up to 74K.
That's an improvement, but it's still not fixed. I can understand the amount of memory used when I open lots of tabs, but it should be freed when I close them all again.
When I finished up undergrad, I didn't want to spend 4-6 years of my life on a PhD, but I also wanted to take more classes in some specific topics, and those classes weren't available at the (really good) small engineering college I'd gone to. I ended up doing a 1 year M.Eng. program at a large university. This gave me the opportunity to take graduate-level courses from very good professors in the areas I was interested in, and I was exposed to a lot of topics which had only been mentioned in passing in undergrad. I found a job with someone one of the professors I'd taken a class from put me in touch with, and having the M.Eng. degree has let me start with a higher position, and work on more interesting projects. So I'd say that a M.Eng./M.S. is worth it if there's a specific area you'd like to learn more in. It will also give you a chance to get to know professors who can help you find a good job, and give your resume a boost over someone who only has a B.S.
I'm running the latest release of firefox with a couple extensions, and there's definitely a memory leak somewhere. After about 4 hours of use, it's up to 97 MB of memory, which leads to really crummy performance, especially when I suspend and restart my laptop. This is running XP Pro with the latest set of patches. If IE had tabs, I might just switch back, because waiting for 3 minutes to get firefox to respond really, really sucks.
One problem I see is that an auction site would require a lot more supervision than a search engine, and introduce all sorts of potential lawsuits. Think about just how frequently you hear of people auctioning illegal objects, or fake auctions. Now think about the number of people you have to have constantly checking up on these things. Remember, if Google screws this up by annoying customers, then those customers won't want to use other Google products, either.
Most systems now limit the number of processes and threads on a per-user basis, meaning that your fork bomb eats up your space, but won't bring the entire system down.
My problem with offshore call centers is that when I give someone large amounts of money for a warranty, including tech support, on a product, I expect to get help when I call their support line, or send an email to tech support. I do not think it's acceptable when the person on the other end of the conversation fails to understand English well enough to help me with my problem. I'm not looking for a deep understanding of computers, but someone who understands that my computer is broken, needs to be serviced, and can actually arrange for it to be picked up, serviced, and dropped off. The problem is that in my experience, the people in offshore call centers (thick accent, a phone line with way too much static, misspelling basic english words, strange grammar in emails) can't handle this. I end up spending three days to get someone to pick up my computer, and then only find out that it's been shipped back to California (original address where I purchased it) instead of New York (where they picked it up!) when, on my 4th attempt at calling, I get someone who speaks English without an accent, and understands what I'm asking him.
Because it's not really stable enough yet for an environement which wants no unscheduled downtime, at least as a server. It's UI also has some problems from a server admin's point of view.
I'll freely admit that I'm an irregular case. At the same time, I don't think the answer to the problem of misbehaving teenagers is to prevent all teenagers from doing things. I still recall far too many rules which prevented me from doing perfectly reasonable things when I was a teenager, and don't want to see teenagers stuck with even more in 10 years.
Ah, generalizations. I'm no longer a teenager, but was fairly reccently.
Your wonderful restrictions on who can ride in a car with a teenager driving? One of those would have prevented me from driving my two younger sisters anywhere and helping out my mom, the other from giving the neighbor across the street a ride to school with me, which saved her about 20 minutes outside in extremely cold and windy weather.
I was actually driving the nicer of the two cars we had most of the time, and it was well taken care of and quite safe.
I had tried slamming on the brakes (in a safe situation) several times, and checked to see how well they responded when I pulled out onto a snowy or otherwise suspicious looking road.
The problem with legal restrictions on what teenage drivers can do is that they prevent perfectly good drivers from driving in reasonable situations, and most of the teenagers who haven't been taught to drive, or are driving unsafely, don't obey them anyho.
Actually, it makes a lot of sense, although not from a strictly economic standpoint. Food is one of the resources a country *has* to have, and you don't want to be stuck relying on another country for food when a war breaks out, even though it's cheaper to purchase food from the other country the rest of the time. Even if you keep a stockpile of food on hand, it's rather difficult to replace a parking lot or strip mall with a field of wheat.
You've got physical access to the box, for as long as you want. I don't care what OS they stuck in there, it can be hacked.
Hell, I'd treat you like an unwelcome guest on my pc. I am running Windows XP, but I patch it on a regular basis, and actually pay some attention to security. You wouldn't be able to get on it without me there, and I'm not going to trust a school's computer support to run random software I don't know on my machine.