Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Fire the fox.

[Dale]

Alan McKinnon wrote:
> Apparently, though unproven, at 07:45 on Sunday 19 September 2010, Lie Ryan
> did opine thusly:
>
>
>> On 09/19/10 09:22, Hilco Wijbenga wrote:
>>
>>> On 18 September 2010 15:14, Kevin O'Gorman<kogorman@×××××.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>>> Is it just me?  Or does Firefox get slower every release?  And less
>>>> stable.
>>>>
>>> Indeed. But FF4 is *much* faster. And much more stable. At least, that
>>> was my experience when I tried it out. I had to go back to 3.6 because
>>> some of the plugins that I need were not yet supported for FF4. At
>>> least the later 3.6 releases aren't as unstable as the previous ones.
>>>
>> Firefox 4 indeed is smoother (probably due to the new animations,
>> probably because none of the plugins I used are compatible yet, but
>> maybe it is just faster); but it is definitely more memory hungrier than
>> before. In Fx3, it usually took around ~20-25% of my 1GB RAM and that's
>> with opening a bunch lot of pages; Fx4 generally takes around ~25-30%.
>>
>> While taking 30% of my RAM is fine when I'm not multitasking, the main
>> problem is I am always multitasking. With Thunderbird taking another
>> 15-20%, emerge ranging from 5-30%, and X about 5-10%, my computer is
>> becoming unbearably slow when memory starved.
>>
>> I've been thinking about adding -Os (optimize-size) to my CFLAGS, does
>> anyone knows if doing that will possibly bring down memory usage and
>> speed up the computer?
>>
> No it will not.
>
> It's the size of the binary code image that is reduced, you may find that the
> firefox *code* in memory is smaller too. But it will do nothing for the data
> structures firefox creates to do it's job.
>
> Think of it this way:
>
> You have a MySQL instance taking up say 20MB in memory. You use it to access a
> 500G database so it uses a whopping amount of memory for the indexes. You
> somehow optimize MySQL so that the code is now 19MB. What effect does that
> have on the 500G database? Answer: none whatsoever.
>
> And you conclusions about memory usage are wrong too. When free says you have
> 1G or RAM (this is true) and top says Thunderbird uses 150M and Firefox 180M,
> together they do not use 330M. Much of that memory is shared.
>
> top tells you "amount of memory that this process can access"
> top does not tell you "amount of memory that this process owns and that
> nothing else can access"
>
>

Yep.  I use Seamonkey which is browser and email all in one.  It doesn't 
use much when I first start it up.  The amount it accumulates as time 
goes on depends on the websites I go to.  If I go to sites that have a 
lot of flash, pictures and gifs, then it starts to using a lot more 
memory.  If I go to say the gentoo forums which is mostly text, it 
doesn't change much.

Just like the example Alan gave, it's not the program itself that is 
using the memory, it's what you are doing with it that uses memory.  I 
have found that the weather radar site and youtube are the biggest 
memory hogs.  One is flash and the other is video, both of which need a 
good bit of memory.  Changing the compile flags isn't going to stop you 
from going to certain sites so it won't help on memory usage.

This is my Seamonkey with email also open and I have only visited a 
couple forums sites:

  7493 dale      20   0  253m 133m  28m S  0.7  6.6   1:59.65 seamonkey-bin

This is the same after going to the weather radar and one youtube music 
clip:

  7493 dale      20   0  331m 177m  33m S  8.6  8.8   3:18.65 seamonkey-bin

If I were to visit other sites, it would go up a lot more.  If you want 
to decrease memory usage, don't go to sites that use flash, have a lot 
of pics and gifs and other things that use a lot of memory.  You could 
do like I do, if it is using a good bit of memory, just close it, wait a 
few seconds and open it back up again.  Nice clean fresh start and 
unlike windoze, no reboot needed.  ;-)

I have Firefox 3.6 on here as well.  It does about the same as 
Seamonkey.  Starts out not using a lot but builds up as I visit other 
sites and things start to load up.  I can't tell any difference in speed 
tho.  I don't use it a whole lot tho so I may not have noticed it.

Dale

:-)  :-)