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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

#291

Post by kalleboo »

dogma1138 wrote: post #42
formula1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that firefox does well is suspend pages you are not using and likely saving the state of the appllication to the disk. Another thing can be for when multiple pages use the same or similar javascript/css/external respurce files, they only need to be loaded once into memory. Another thing canbe that certain javascript globals would only be loaded when the getter asks for them. Something like AudioContext and…

If that's that case I much rather my browser eat up more RAM than needlessly write to my SSD. A lot of the improvement in the reliability of consumer grade SSDs is due to OS improvements in how they manage their write operations to the hard drive. Windows is considerably more conservative in how it uses it's page file and what does it write off to the SSD, linux has also made a lot of improvements in how it uses the…

> A lot of the improvement in the reliability of consumer grade SSDs is due to OS improvements in how they manage their write operations

Do you have any references for this? I don't think I've ever heard a story of a consumer user running out their writes. Not saying it hasn't happened, but it's not enough of a common occurrence to be a major factor in reliability.

In my experience the overwhelming improvement in reliability is in the firmware of these drivers coming out of the perpetual beta phase (and the death of OCZ)

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

#292

Post by Fuzzwah »

dTal wrote: post #159
1ris wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware does not get exponetially better. Maybe it did in 90ties and 00ers. Right now hardwardware gets slimmer, less power consuming and cheaper. But not better. My 12 year old (then mid-end gaming pc) is pretty much exactly as fast as my current, 2(?) year old office machine. (x264 and other mulit-threaed cpu benchbmarks) But it costs a fraction and uses next to no energy. /edit: Yes this is wrong. I made a mistak…

Love the redundancy of "90ties", but what's the etymology of "00ers"?

Noughties

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

#293

Post by mook »

zobzu wrote: post #227
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?

it makes sense though as more features are in use on the set of tested pages, these will inevitably use more ram. its good to monitor and ensure that stays within acceptable parameters though, and potentially improved upon again. at least the gain is pretty slow since they "fixed all the stuff"

IIRC, the set of tested pages are a static snapshot; I don't think the machines have general internet access (because that would lead to spurious failures when the other end has problems, which is annoying as that means nobody can check in code).

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

#294

Post by kalleboo »

the8472 wrote: post #43
schoen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone describe what the "architecture that doesn't eat all your RAM" here is? Is it possible that it will inadvertently provide weaker security protections between tabs than the more naive and RAM-intensive architecture?

a) your security should not rely on process isolation. the javascript engine etc. should be secure in the first place. if you can break out of the JS sandbox you can already attack addon scripts (think password managers) b) hosting some tabs in the same, sandboxed process is still stronger than hosting all of them in the parent process.

I thought extensions also mostly ran in their own processes, with messaging access into the tabs? So a password manager would have its critical code in its own process and only access the tab to look for fields to inject into, and hence be protected.

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

#295

Post by kalleboo »

the8472 wrote: post #56
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #10

Its incredible multi-process took this long. Just goes to show you that your architecture decisions last a long time and are often difficult to change. Chrome had this from day one and never had a big and old codebase to worry about. Yet it took Firefox many years to get multi-process going and my understanding is that its much more limited and simpler than what Chrome or Edge do. I'm also a little surprised there ha…

Addons are a big part of the firefox ecosystem and they reach deep into the internals of the browser. So just replacing the browser wholesale would break a lot of things over the course of a single release.

They are deprecating the old add-on API now in favor of a more Chrome/Safari-like one now though

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

#296

Post by brokenmachine »

corford wrote: post #174

I've got 732 tabs open at the moment and performance is still fine. The upper limit for my machine seems to be about 745 ish - much beyond that and FF runs out of video memory or something (new tabs render sites half black).

Lol, I've seen that issue myself, but only at maybe half that (ridiculous!) number of tabs.

If you make the window smaller you can still do some stuff, but you need to restart FF (and wait for your 732 tabs to reopen!) to get everything back to normal.

Computers are meant to solve problems, not create mindless tab-closing jobs for humans! We should never have to close a tab! Tab hoarders unite!!

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

#297

Post by kalleboo »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #10

Its incredible multi-process took this long. Just goes to show you that your architecture decisions last a long time and are often difficult to change. Chrome had this from day one and never had a big and old codebase to worry about. Yet it took Firefox many years to get multi-process going and my understanding is that its much more limited and simpler than what Chrome or Edge do. I'm also a little surprised there ha…

> I'm also a little surprised there hasn't been an attempt to launch a completely new Firefox from the ground up.

It's interesting how the history goes.

We had Netscape 4, and it was crap (remember when resizing a window reloaded the whole page?)

So they was a ground-up rewrite of the rendering engine, resulting in Gecko, which was put in Mozilla.

Gecko was great but Mozilla was a bloaty amalgamation of features, so this was created a pared-down Gecko version called...

~Phoenix~ ~Firebird~ Firefox, which had the great rendering engine and a lean, native-like UI.

Then there was KHTML/KJS which was built for KDE, which had a lean architecture but didn't have the investment to get the compatibility 100% there...

Which Apple then poured into the project in their fork to WebKit, which paid off in spades on the resource-limited iPhone a couple years later.

But Safari was only on the Mac (aside from their "Cocoa on Windows" version and a few open source ports), which Google took as a reason to create...

Google Chrome, where the biggest innovation was rendering each page in its own process (since Safari could freeze up due to one page going in an infinite loop in JavaScript).

So will someone out-Firefox Firefox and do what Chrome was to Safari for multi-processing? Take the rendering engine and put a new chrome on top of it?

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

#298

Post by emp_zealoth »

hueving wrote: post #289
wongarsu wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An extremely low-energy atom, that runs at half the frequency might have about the same performance as a top-of the line 12-year old Pentium 4, but that's not a meaningful comparison in my eyes, considering that we still have high-end gaming PCs today. A 11 year old Pentium 4 @3.4GHz has a passmark score of 401. A modern 2-core $40 Celeron G1840 @2.80GHz has a passmark score of 2984. And that's among the cheapest pro…

>that's not a meaningful comparison in my eyes, considering that we still have high-end gaming PCs today. It is meaningful when you consider what the average user is purchasing. Back then you had to purchase good stuff to run the latest office apps, etc. It was common that the only thing needed to get a friend into the gaming world was the purchase of a graphics card. Now most casual users do not have anything close…

Right now buying anything that doesnt have an atom gets you a literal monster. I've had a "decent" laptop (entry level i3 and entry level discrete AMD spits with disgust GPU) from 2010 and anything for the same price in 2016 will get you an order of magnitude more powerful machine

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

#299

Post by roel_v »

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

More memory doesn't help. I have 64gb and still need to close ff every few days. (Granted I do keep 50-100 tabs open at all times).

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

#300

Post by yuhong »

fnj wrote: post #116
chakalakasp wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be more technically precise, the limit comes from UDIMMs based on 4Gbit DDR3. DDR4 does have 8Gbit chips, but...
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