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Firefox, Heal Thyself

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#51

Post by jlgreco »

DEinspanjer wrote: post #37
acjohnson55 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure if this applies, but I really hope they provide better tools to identify badly behaving webpages. Sometimes when my CPU or memory are being cranked by Firefox, I really just want to kill the one tab out of 50 that's causing all the problems.

That isn't currently a target area for FHR. Things pertaining to the performance of particular webpages and such are extremely difficult to tease out of the data in a meaningful way. Not to say we will never include something like that in FHR, just not in the first couple of revisions of it. Have you tried out the about:memory page? It doesn't do CPU, but it is a good way to see what particular pages are hogging memo…

> Things pertaining to the performance of particular webpages and such are extremely difficult to tease out of the data in a meaningful way.

It seems to me that you could do this "well enough" if you put each page in its own process and let the OS tell you which are burning the CPU. There could/would be edge-cases where a page causing issues would not appear like it was causing issues, looking at it from that level, but it would sure as hell be a good start.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#52

Post by piyush_soni »

DEinspanjer wrote: post #37
acjohnson55 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure if this applies, but I really hope they provide better tools to identify badly behaving webpages. Sometimes when my CPU or memory are being cranked by Firefox, I really just want to kill the one tab out of 50 that's causing all the problems.

That isn't currently a target area for FHR. Things pertaining to the performance of particular webpages and such are extremely difficult to tease out of the data in a meaningful way. Not to say we will never include something like that in FHR, just not in the first couple of revisions of it. Have you tried out the about:memory page? It doesn't do CPU, but it is a good way to see what particular pages are hogging memo…

Is it that Chrome is able to do it just because it's a separate process per tab? (It shows memory consumption by each page.) I try to go to the about:memory page every once in a while, but first that doesn't show information in a very intuitive way, and second, NONE OF the 'GC', 'CC', or the 'Minimize Memory Usage' buttons seem to reduce Firefox's memory usage. Sometimes pressing these buttons actually increases the RAM usage (as seen from the Task Manager on Windows) - which is beyond my understanding. The only way to reclaim the 2 GB of my system RAM firefox has captured is to restart it.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#53

Post by olympus »

It looks like the Mozilla team is doing such great stuff nowadays. I converted to Chrome a few years back and it seemed like Firefox was stagnant. But I think the competition has been good for them, they've been doing lots of neat stuff recently. I'm thinking about switching back, or figuring out a way to use two different browsers.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#54

Post by piyush_soni »

vanderZwan wrote: post #18
Goronmon wrote: post #14

Funnily enough, Firefox died on my system today and I haven't been able to get it working since. Just freezes after start up, even in safe mode (well, when it even booted up, which it stopped doing after a couple tries).

On my computer it sometimes doesn't open a window unless I open a second instance of Firefox, and then both suddenly load. Try that maybe?

That second 'instance' (it actually keeps only one instance running) might not be helping in bringing up your windows. Try clearing your (startup/local) cache, it might have become really big. I do that whenever my Firefox takes long times to start - if you check in Process Monitor, at that time it is dealing with those cache folders.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#55

Post by jfb »

scott_s wrote: post #30
hollerith wrote: post #23

I wish one of the most important tools for publishing and consuming text on the internet weren't so prone to problems as to require a dedicated health-reporting subsystem. My text editor and my email client don't need dedicated health-reporting subsystems.

Your text editor and email client aren't also capable of running arbitrary applications. Modern web browsers have more in common with operating systems than with text editors and email clients.

I use Emacs, so, um. Yeah.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#56

Post by scott_s »

hollerith wrote: post #48
scott_s wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rather like this fact. It allows things like GMail, YouTube and the fantastic work I see on the NY Times.

I wish you could have your GMail, YouTube, etc, and I could have a way to use the internet to access a wide variety of writings without my having to deal with a system so complicated or unreliable that users are being invited to learn a new health-monitoring subsystem for it. ADDED. An argument can be made that my operating system is already a system so complicated or unreliable that it requires its own specialized h…

I think the fact that the world doesn't work like that is inherent, not accidental.

Although there are text-only web browsers. But there's a reason I don't use them.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#57

Post by mccr8 »

piyush_soni wrote: post #52
DEinspanjer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't currently a target area for FHR. Things pertaining to the performance of particular webpages and such are extremely difficult to tease out of the data in a meaningful way. Not to say we will never include something like that in FHR, just not in the first couple of revisions of it. Have you tried out the about:memory page? It doesn't do CPU, but it is a good way to see what particular pages are hogging memo…

Is it that Chrome is able to do it just because it's a separate process per tab? (It shows memory consumption by each page.) I try to go to the about:memory page every once in a while, but first that doesn't show information in a very intuitive way, and second, NONE OF the 'GC', 'CC', or the 'Minimize Memory Usage' buttons seem to reduce Firefox's memory usage. Sometimes pressing these buttons actually increases the…

The garbage collector and cycle collector are run all the time normally, so clicking on those buttons shouldn't have too much effect on memory when you are using the browser normally. They are mostly useful for getting to a settled memory state right after opening a page rather than having to wait a few minutes for it to naturally happen, or in the rare cases where a GC should be triggered but isn't.

As for why running the GC might increase RAM usage, I guess it is possible that some memory had been paged out, but running the GC causes the browser to touch all memory, paging it back in. That's just a guess though.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#58

Post by mikecane »

mccr8 wrote: post #42
yogo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you mentioned about:memory. I usually read the changelog when they push out a release but somehow I missed that. This is a very nice breakdown of the memory.

about:memory has been gradually improved over the last two years.

Whoa. I just peeked at that and was astonished to see:

├───68.22 MB (28.62%) -- window-objects │ ├──41.12 MB (17.25%) -- top(https://twitter.com/, id=55)/active │ │ ├──39.86 MB (16.72%) -- window(https://twitter.com/) │ │ │ ├──18.17 MB (07.62%) -- js │ │ │ │ ├──18.13 MB (07.61%) -- compartment(https://twitter.com/)

Just to run Twitter uses a ton of memory?

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#59

Post by com2kid »

rexreed wrote: post #26
shocks wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're already fixing memory leaks. In fact, Firefox now uses less memory than Chrome. Let me guess, you're another person who hasn't used Firefox in a few years hasn't bothered to check out the latest versions at all? :)

For me, alas, with 5 windows open and many, many tabs per window, Firefox regularly climbs into the 1 Gig+ memory range. The solution: less windows and tabs, I guess. But I was hoping / expecting the memory profile to change significantly over the past few builds. And yes, I am using the latest build, I check about:memory regularly, stripped out the unneeded add-ons, but maybe I've just got too much stuff open and th…

I have seen certain running web apps that leak memory across any browser they are run in. Firefox can't do anything about poorly written Javascript.

Re: Firefox, Heal Thyself

#60

Post by com2kid »

My single largest issue with Firefox stability is constantly running into the 32bit memory barrier. Either split tabs out into multiple processes, or enable 64bit support already.

My browser crashes on average twice a day due to running out of memory and FF just giving up. It doesn't even crash gracefully, it just up and quits.

(I frequently have ~100 tabs open, and I am quite thankful that Firefox lets me search across my tabs! Very useful feature)

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