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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

#241

Post by toomanybeersies »

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?

Firefox has gotten much more stable over recent years in regards to having excessive amounts of tabs open. I can have over 300 tabs open and it's stable (I was using Waterfox when doing this in Windows though).

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

#243

Post by nusq »

azinman2 wrote: post #222
nusq wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Where are those improvements reflected in the graph?

Well..AWSY started a few years ago and many things happend to firefox since then. I cannot tell you exactly what increase corresponds to a memory measurment improvement but i can point you to the blog of Nicholas Netherote https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/

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

#244

Post by Jhsto »

aphextron wrote: post #199
tdkl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. Get Chromium. http://chromium.woolyss.com/

Chromium would be great if it had a decent library of extensions like Firefox. As is, I'll stick with the latter.

Which extensions namely? Chromium does support all the same extensions as Chrome does.

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

#245

Post by flukus »

toxican wrote: post #23
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…

A few years ago if you'd told me FF would be the RAM-sensitive browser, I'd have laughed you off the internet.

A few years ago I had a a ptoato android tablet. The thing couldn't play music without stuttering, chrome would take more than a minute to render a page, then another minute if you scrolled.

Firefox was first released for android around the time I bought it though, and turned it into a capable web browsing device.

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

#246

Post by antisthenes »

wongarsu wrote: post #201
antisthenes wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Thanks for clarifying. If you know anyone willing to donate 2002 era hardware, I'd be willing to do some tests and benchmarks.

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

#247

Post by juandazapata »

reitanqild wrote: post #208
mccr8 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Or you can buy 2GB of RAM with those $30

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

#248

Post by lxt »

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?

We have several different mechanisms for running experiments. The e10s one specifically runs through what we rather poorly named a "system add-on".

e10s code is present in all builds. The system add-on contains logic that decides whether to turn it on or not. The system add-on can be updated daily (or more often), in all channels.

* I apologize for the naming, this is entirely my fault. I spent a lot of the last twelve months scheming/designing and developing experimental update mechanisms for Firefox.

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

#249

Post by p0nce »

wongarsu wrote: post #76
azinman2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Getting worse at displaying the same webpage, while actual webpages become heavier. Here I am with 6 opened tab and 800mb of RAM taken by Firefox.

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

#250

Post by nirvdrum »

juandazapata wrote: post #247
reitanqild wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 a…

Or you can buy 2GB of RAM with those $30

We've reached a point where a lot of consumer hardware simply can't be upgraded. The ideal of just adding more RAM isn't possible (or perhaps practical in many cases). MBPs can't be upgraded at all these days. My Lenovo laptop can, but going 16 GB -> 32 GB requires far more than $30 since I'd need to buy 16 GB SODIMMs.

That's also a bit beside the point. I have a workstation with 48 GB RAM. I left a browser running in the background and had one tab consume 20 GB on its own before I killed it. Many of these leaks seem to just be unbounded memory growth, so that hypothetical 2 GB you add is going to be eaten up in short order anyway.

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