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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

#201

Post by wongarsu »

antisthenes wrote: post #197
wongarsu wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>completely ignores troves of older hardware existing in people's homes that has to run browsers just as well. The performance has gotten worse for users of a computer from 2006, but it has improved for users of ten-year old computers (since a ten-year old computer in 2012 would have been from 2002). If you assume that a computer is less likely to be used the older it gets (and that this rate is roughly stable), then…

> The performance has gotten worse for users of a computer from 2006, but it has improved for users of ten-year old computers I'm not sure I follow that logic.

I'm saying that the performance of today's firefox on 2006 hardware is better than the performance of 2012's firefox on 2002 hardware. I consider that to be a better measure than to compare both releases on 2006 hardware.

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

#202

Post by smsm42 »

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.

No, it's not cheap at all, because buying the physical chips is not the end of it. For some laptops - like macbook air - there is a limit of how much they support, and it's not that high. Some models are not even upgradable - they just have soldered-in 8G and that's it.

> you need to close some tabs

This comment is really not contributing anything to the matter. Obviously everybody could think of closing tabs without you advising to do so, and if they don't, it may be because they want these tabs around. I regularly keep a lot of tabs around because this is my work pattern.

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

#204

Post by matt_wulfeck »

I don't know. "Eating up all my ram" seems perfectly acceptable to me at first glance. I purchase ram and use it in my computer for expressly this purpose: to improve the responsiveness and snappiness of programs.

Where do you draw the line at what's acceptable use of ram and what's not? I have 32G on my desktop, is it unacceptable that chrome is using 8G?

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

#205

Post by pirocks »

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #146
luckydude wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at 2.9G virtual 1.277g resident with about 130 tabs open (yeah, I'm a goofball but I like my tabs). It's pretty responsive on a thinkpad x220 i5-2540M @ 2.6ghz, 8G of ram and an SSD.

Not even criticizing, but how do you manage 130 tabs? How do you find tabs you're looking for? You must have some kind of system!

I use tab groups https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa....

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

#206

Post by chalion »

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #146
luckydude wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at 2.9G virtual 1.277g resident with about 130 tabs open (yeah, I'm a goofball but I like my tabs). It's pretty responsive on a thinkpad x220 i5-2540M @ 2.6ghz, 8G of ram and an SSD.

Not even criticizing, but how do you manage 130 tabs? How do you find tabs you're looking for? You must have some kind of system!

You can use the Awesome Bar to search open tabs: just prefix your query with '%'.

More search tips can be found here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...

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

#207

Post by scott_karana »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #204

I don't know. "Eating up all my ram" seems perfectly acceptable to me at first glance. I purchase ram and use it in my computer for expressly this purpose: to improve the responsiveness and snappiness of programs. Where do you draw the line at what's acceptable use of ram and what's not? I have 32G on my desktop, is it unacceptable that chrome is using 8G?

I think it's "inefficient use of RAM" that they're talking about.

If Firefox should conceivably run in 8GB, but ends up trying to use 33GB (in your case), that would obviously be bad.

Mozilla just targets efficiencies that include people with much, much less RAM than you for their baseline.

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

#208

Post by reitanqild »

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…

>> by being able to mark tabs as "no background activity allowed"

> 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 state got lost when you switched back.

GP is talking about actively marking tabs as "no background activity allowed".

I have been searching in vain for something like that: stop scripts in background tabs except for specifically whitelisted pages.

There is absolutely no reason that I can see why every website and their ads should be allowed to roam around freely in the background.

There is however a number of reason why they should not be allowed. Battery life and phishing attempts readily comes to mind.

I guess whoever comes up with a well-working extension for that can easily ask me for USD 30 or even 40 and expect me to be a walking billboard for it ;-)

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

#209

Post by hackuser »

smsm42 wrote: post #189
wongarsu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.

My hardware doesn't improve exponentially. In fact, my current work laptop has less memory (8G) than my previous one (16G) or previous desktop machine (also 16G). And it mostly works with Chrome, but I stopped using Firefox because my habit of opening dozens of tabs led to stratospheric memory usages that killed even 16G machines. That was somewhere in 2013, looks like it's even worse now?

> I stopped using Firefox because my habit of opening dozens of tabs led to stratospheric memory usages that killed even 16G machines

I don't think that's representative of how Firefox works. I used Firefox similarly in 2013 and didn't see those problems; the users supported by my company, mostly on 4GB machines, also didn't see them.

I have a 112 tabs open right now and Firefox has been running for a couple of weeks, which means thousands more have been opened and closed. It's using 4 GB of memory (EDIT: Which is more than usual, but it's fine with me).

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

#210

Post by nusq »

azinman2 wrote: post #64
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they're still at it, too: https://areweslimyet.com/

Maybe I'm misreading things but it looks like it's been constantly getting worse since 2012?

You are misreading given that there were big improvements in memory measurment and some of the memory use increase you notice are just firefox measuring better it's own memory
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