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