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Boris Zbarsky | 11 May 2011 07:27
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Re: Firefox fat on Javascript?

On 5/10/11 11:59 PM, mfwitten <at> gmail.com wrote:
> Guys, what is going on here?

So to sum up:

1)  Your main browsing account takes 143MB of RAM.  That seems ok, 
depending on what you have loaded, what sort of build this is, etc.

2)  Your browser with gmail loaded uses 248MB.  That may be right 
depending on what you've done with gmail in the past.  Note that gmail 
has a known memory leak wherein the memory it takes will increase while 
the page is open.  This leak is due to the gmail scripts holding on to a 
bunch of objects and keeping them reachable so they can't be GCed.  It 
manifests in all browsers.  Google is working on rolling out a fix for this.

3) Your browser with Vimperator.  This could maybe use looking into; the 
last time I ran a debug build in this configuration it asserted like 
crazy due to all the invariants Vimperator was violating, so I wouldn't 
be too surprised if there are issues here.

> However, I think it's safe to say that what is essentially an untouched
> GUI frontend to Gmail should not register as taking up 248 MiB of my
> physical memory!

Why not?

> and neither should a couple of windows with some static
> text and pictures in them just because of a few interface tweaks
> (`Vimperator').
(Continue reading)

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mfwitten | 12 May 2011 17:52
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Re: Firefox fat on Javascript?

On Wed, 11 May 2011 01:27:01 -0400, Boris Zbarsky wrote:

> On 5/10/11 11:59 PM, mfwitten <at> gmail.com wrote:
>> [It seems reasonable for a browser to require at least 143 MiB of
>> physical memory.]

Maybe it is, but my intuition says otherwise; I doubt we will come
to a satisfactory conclusion in this discussion, so we'll leave it
at that.

>> Surely the Laws of the Universe do not require 2/3 of my physical memory to
>> run 3 different profiles of a goddamn web browser. Even Profile 0 seems a
>> little rotund; I mean, FFS, that little guy alone uses enough memory to hold
>> 16 fullscreen, 32-bit RGBA (that is, including alpha) dumps of my 1920x1200
>> resolution screen. WTF is Firefox doing?
>
> about:memory (especially with Nicholas Nethercote's recent changes) 
> should be able to tell you some of that.

The data from about:memory for each firefox instance follows; for reference,
here are the descriptions of the 3 instances (each of which runs a different
profile):

  Profile                     Usage
  -------                     -----
     0       Reading news (aggregators and otherwise),
             watching YouTube and other Flash video,
             making `First!' posts on slashdot, reading
             technical documentation, searching for
             everything via Google, editing Wikipedia,
(Continue reading)

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Boris Zbarsky | 12 May 2011 19:39
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Re: Firefox fat on Javascript?

On 5/12/11 11:52 AM, mfwitten <at> gmail.com wrote:
> The data from about:memory for each firefox instance follows

OK, so the gmail and vimperator ones have a much larger JS gc heap. 
That's actual JS objects that are in use by whatever JS code is running, 
and is consistent with the gmail and vimperator JS just creating a bunch 
of objects and holding on to them.

The vimperator instance also has a bunch more images being used than the 
other two instances, and a _lot_ more layout datastructures.  That's a 
little odd and may indicate leaks in either vimperator itself or Gecko 
in cases that vimperator tickles.

If you start a browser with vimperator showing nothing but about:blank 
and do the same without vimperator (just use clean profiles for both, 
with one having vimperator installed), how do the about:memory outputs 
compare?

Also, if you are willing to try a nightly build that would give much 
more readable and useful about:memory output; since the plan is to run 
against a clean profile anyway it won't get in the way of your other builds.

> For dubious reasons, Mailman munged the Message-ID of my last email,

This may have something to do with the fact that I'm reading this group 
and replying over NNTP, not e-mail.

> If you add such munging to the fact that a user must subscribe to each
> mailing list before posting
(Continue reading)

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Robert Kaiser | 13 May 2011 00:57
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Re: Firefox fat on Javascript?

mfwitten <at> gmail.com schrieb:
> On Wed, 11 May 2011 01:27:01 -0400, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>
>> On 5/10/11 11:59 PM, mfwitten <at> gmail.com wrote:
>>> [It seems reasonable for a browser to require at least 143 MiB of
>>> physical memory.]
>
> Maybe it is, but my intuition says otherwise

I agree with you that a "browser" should be able to run with less 
memory, but then, what we have in Firefox, Chrome, IE9, Safari, etc. 
today are not "browsers" but "web runtimes", if you will. The collection 
of lean documents that the web once was has evolved to being an 
ever-growing application platform, and many of the often-used websites 
today actually are more web applications than what "web pages" were 
10-15 years ago.
And for the web application runtime engines that have become of our 
"browsers" of old it's really reasonable to require that amount of 
memory, esp. given the fact that even most smartphones sold today have 
more available than that.

Robert Kaiser

--

-- 
Note that any statements of mine - no matter how passionate - are never 
meant to be offensive but very often as food for thought or possible 
arguments that we as a community needs answers to. And most of the time, 
I even appreciate irony and fun! :)
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Michael Witten | 13 May 2011 07:43
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'But firefox is no longer just a browser' (Firefox fat on Javascript?)

[Sorry for the repeat, Robert; I got ahead of myself.]

On Fri, 13 May 2011 00:57:29 +0200, Robert Kaiser wrote:

> mfwitten <at> gmail.com schrieb:
>> On Wed, 11 May 2011 01:27:01 -0400, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>>
>>> On 5/10/11 11:59 PM, mfwitten <at> gmail.com wrote:
>>>> [It seems reasonable for a browser to require at least 143 MiB of
>>>> physical memory.]
>>
>> Maybe it is, but my intuition says otherwise
>
> I agree with you that a "browser" should be able to run with less 
> memory, but then, what we have in Firefox, Chrome, IE9, Safari, etc. 
> today are not "browsers" but "web runtimes", if you will. The collection 
> of lean documents that the web once was has evolved to being an 
> ever-growing application platform, and many of the often-used websites 
> today actually are more web applications than what "web pages" were 
> 10-15 years ago.
> And for the web application runtime engines that have become of our 
> "browsers" of old it's really reasonable to require that amount of 
> memory, esp. given the fact that even most smartphones sold today have 
> more available than that.

I decided to run a test.

I killed X11 and then started it up again, giving me a fresh GUI environment
within my system (which has an uptime of almost 8 days); I then got a few
programs running, and here are the highlights:
(Continue reading)

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crowder | 13 May 2011 20:37
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Re: 'But firefox is no longer just a browser' (Firefox fat on Javascript?)

If you're using gmail and youtube, you're using your browser as an
"app platform".  These are not the 15k HTML pages "of yore".
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Michael Witten | 15 May 2011 21:14
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Re: 'But firefox is no longer just a browser' (Firefox fat on Javascript?)

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 18:37, crowder <crowderbt <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> If you're using gmail and youtube, you're using your browser as an
> "app platform".  These are not the 15k HTML pages "of yore".

I wrote:

>> ... and it fits into just as much memory as Firefox on a good day when
>> I'm NOT using it as a next generation runtime (but rather as just a plain
>> old web browser pretty much of yore).

I'm telling you there that I'm not using it for YouTube and Gmail.

Guys, please take an interest in performance in both space and time;
quit trying to blame the victim.
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Boris Zbarsky | 16 May 2011 04:20
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Re: 'But firefox is no longer just a browser' (Firefox fat on Javascript?)

On 5/15/11 3:14 PM, Michael Witten wrote:
> Guys, please take an interest in performance in both space and time;
> quit trying to blame the victim.

Michael, please stop making baseless accusations of not having an 
interest, ok?  ;)

-Boris
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Robert Helmer | 16 May 2011 23:27
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graphs.allizom.org going down for upgrade tomorrow 11 AM Pacific

The perfomatic 2.0 staging server, http://graphs.allizom.org, is going
down tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific for an OS upgrade.

We're trying to deploy to production and having some issues with
reproducing the staging environment since it's a different OS version.

I expect it to take a few hours, and will send an update if it's not
up by 3 PM (or when it's done, whichever comes first).
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Robert Helmer | 17 May 2011 23:59
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Re: graphs.allizom.org going down for upgrade tomorrow 11 AM Pacific

On May 16, 2:27 pm, Robert Helmer <rhel... <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> The perfomatic 2.0 staging server,http://graphs.allizom.org, is going
> down tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific for an OS upgrade.
>
> We're trying to deploy to production and having some issues with
> reproducing the staging environment since it's a different OS version.
>
> I expect it to take a few hours, and will send an update if it's not
> up by 3 PM (or when it's done, whichever comes first).

Serverops hit some snags upgrading this machine, they are continuing
to work on it.
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Gmane