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Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

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Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#111

Post by falcolas »

dxxvi wrote: post #65
0xfeba wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I have the same lockups with Chrome. Middle-clicking a new link (to open in a new tab) freezes the entire browser (all tabs) until the new tab is done loading. I believe it's a extension problem (uBlock Origin, EFF Privacy Badger), but I don't really want to get rid of any of them.

I know this is not about ad blockers, but does anybody have any experience of using something like https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/blob/master/hosts instead of uBlock Origin? Or even use it in the hosts file of our dd-wrt/openwrt routers?

I use something similar, and love it. Still get blocked by Forbes and similar for using an ad blocker (it's a network issue, you dolts!), but the performance gains in all browsers is well worth the few exceptions.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#112

Post by sp332 »

danblick wrote: post #6

Does anybody know more about how Mozilla manages experiments? I'd always assumed that all users downloaded an identical binary and got the same behavior. How do they assign 10% of their users to an experimental group? Is it possible that two users will see different functionality when they are both using the same OS and release, say Firefox from the latest version of Ubuntu?

Certain features are rolled out with Test Pilot https://wiki.mozilla.org/Test_Pilot but that doesn't seem to include the e10s testing.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#113

Post by watwatwatwat »

chakalakasp wrote: post #107
rsp1984 wrote: post #19

“We can learn from the competition,” said Dotzler. “The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM.” That's the money quote here. I've been waiting for this for a long time actually. Every browser I've tried except Firefox just basically eats all my RAM and other app performance (e.g. compiling stuff…

The thing is, workstation and laptop RAM is so cheap. If your browser is eating an appreciable chunk of your 16 or 32GB of RAM, you need to close some tabs.

I'm tired of this argument. My browser is not the only piece of software I'm running. I usually have virtualbox, a compiler, an IDE running. And sometimes some scripts/programs I wrote that does intensive computing on some data set.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#114

Post by uuoc »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #57
addicted wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript was little more than a toy scripting language used to animate stuff and change layouts when html/Css wouldn't fit for the greatest part of firefox's early existence. At the time it was probably the appropriate decision. Now, it's a huge burden on Firefox and it's good to finally see progress on this front.

Since Javascript is just a language that happens to execute client-side within the browser, why can we not use an existing language syntax (or an existing language entirely) for this purpose? For example, Go, Python, Rust, or perhaps Perl? It feels like a broken shell scripting language that really should have been replaced.

You can, but you should not run the UI script code on the same non-reentrant JS engine that executes scripts delivered from the internet at large.

By doing so (running both the UI code and scripts from the internet on the same non-reentrant JS engine) means that only one gets to run at a time (either UI code or JS from the internet). That's why FF's responsiveness sucks at times, any long running JS script from the internet also prevents the UI code from running.

The JS engine should either have been reentrant (so UI code could run even though some random internet script was still running), or there should have been two independent JS interpreters loaded, one used for the UI code only and a second for all the JS from the internet.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#115

Post by mrec »

alyandon wrote: post #70
marcosdumay wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funniest thing is that FF memory usage didn't go down that much. For me it is even higher.

I'm currently at a little over 1 GB with 8 tabs open. I really wish I had the option to trade off responsiveness for memory usage by being able to mark tabs as "no background activity allowed" so FF could serialize that content to disk when the tab isn't in focus.

I'm curious - what's the benefit of doing this sort of thing at the application level, rather than letting the OS's virtual memory system handle it as usual?

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#116

Post by fnj »

chakalakasp wrote: post #107
rsp1984 wrote: post #19

“We can learn from the competition,” said Dotzler. “The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM.” That's the money quote here. I've been waiting for this for a long time actually. Every browser I've tried except Firefox just basically eats all my RAM and other app performance (e.g. compiling stuff…

The thing is, workstation and laptop RAM is so cheap. If your browser is eating an appreciable chunk of your 16 or 32GB of RAM, you need to close some tabs.

Forgive me; your statement does not make sense. First you're implying that all you have to do is get more RAM; then you're admitting that you only have a certain amount, so you should stop using so much.

In actuality, very few non-server PCs can be populated with any more than 16-32 GB. It's not a matter of bother or expense at all. It's a design limit.

Every single time I've driven a non-server PC into hopeless swap thrashing, it's been the damn browser that was the culprit. Don't bother trying to advise me to bookmark 100 open tabs in 10 windows to save space. That is (forgive me) an insult to one's intelligence.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#117

Post by merb »

wjoe wrote: post #16
nl wrote: post #7

I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…

I've found Firefox performance to be absolutely awful at work on OS X. I have no issues at all with it at home on Linux, and didn't have any issues in my previous job on OS X either. I'm not sure if it's OS X specific, a change in recent versions, this laptop being underpowered, or the nature of the work I do (a lot of video stuff), but anything JS heavy severely slows down or locks up the browser. And if anything, i…

I've thought exactly the same.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#118

Post by nchelluri »

Ah, so because I use addons I might not be seeing these benefits for some time? Good to know.

Chrome is right now way faster for me, but I prefer using FF so I am in the Mozilla camp right now. Eager to see this rolled out. Early versions of e10s were very fragile and not so usable for me, so I switched it off.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#119

Post by blakeyrat »

rsp1984 wrote: post #19

“We can learn from the competition,” said Dotzler. “The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM.” That's the money quote here. I've been waiting for this for a long time actually. Every browser I've tried except Firefox just basically eats all my RAM and other app performance (e.g. compiling stuff…

I'm not a Firefox user, but considering that 95% of the time about half my RAM is going unused (well, Windows uses it for pre-caching random stuff it thinks I might need), I don't mind high memory usage as long as I get a benefit for it.

If it's just inefficient, that's a different story.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#120

Post by MichaelGG »

mccr8 wrote: post #78
alyandon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently at a little over 1 GB with 8 tabs open. I really wish I had the option to trade off responsiveness for memory usage by being able to mark tabs as "no background activity allowed" so FF could serialize that content to disk when the tab isn't in focus.

The main reason tabs aren't saved to disk isn't a concern about responsiveness, it is a concern about data loss. You have to be very sure that you restore the state exactly. What if you spent a few hours filling out some government form online, then you went and took a break by watching a few YouTube videos? Memory usage might spike up, and the browser decides to unload the tab with the form. You'd be mad if form sta…

FF mobile does this and it drives me nuts. I'll be on 4chan, watch a YT clip, then tab back and FF reloads the original HTML. Apart from being slow (takes a few seconds to rerender it all), it also loses AJAX-loaded data.

My phone reports it has 600MB of RAM free, so I dunno what's causing FF's behaviour here nor how to disable it. I can't always reproduce it, but it happens enough that every browsing session has some sort of frustration.

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