[gentoo-user] Re: Fire the fox.

[Lie Ryan]

On 09/19/10 19:04, Dale wrote:
> 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.

When I'm doing emerge or other things, I usually switches to Epiphany,
dillo, or links; depending on how unbearable things becomes.

> 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.

I'm opening mostly standard HTML pages (gmail, static pages, etc) and
the memory usage is still quite bad.

> 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

Incidentally, I've found that browsing using Thunderbrowse extension in
Thunderbird is much more memory friendly than using Firefox itself
(Thunderbird still uses around 15-20% memory, compared to 20-30% that
Firefox uses). If only Thunderbrowse's interface is not so buggy...