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Electrolysis – run web content in a separate process from Firefox

wiki.mozilla.org

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Re: Electrolysis – run web content in a separate process from Firefox

#91

Post by pcwalton »

jude- wrote: post #84
pcwalton wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But surely, the tabs run private instances of the layout engine and javascript VM when they process the page, no? No. For example, you can get direct access to another tab's "window" object in this way, as long as it's same-origin: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/window.open... > When would it ever make sense for multiple tabs to directly access each other's runtime state? For Web compatibility.

I'm not sure that your example prevents the implementation of per-tab javascript VMs. Wouldn't the browser be designed such that its kernel mediated all tab-to-tab runtime state queries? Then, tabs wouldn't directly access each other's state, and the kernel would interpose security policies (such as same-origin-only requests) between tabs regardless of a tab's behavior. To keep this arrangement transparent to program…

That would break the Web, because you would introduce data races into JavaScript. (Think about the granularity of synchronization on the objects you would need.)

Re: Electrolysis – run web content in a separate process from Firefox

#92

Post by justinschuh »

jude- wrote: post #84
pcwalton wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But surely, the tabs run private instances of the layout engine and javascript VM when they process the page, no? No. For example, you can get direct access to another tab's "window" object in this way, as long as it's same-origin: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/window.open... > When would it ever make sense for multiple tabs to directly access each other's runtime state? For Web compatibility.

I'm not sure that your example prevents the implementation of per-tab javascript VMs. Wouldn't the browser be designed such that its kernel mediated all tab-to-tab runtime state queries? Then, tabs wouldn't directly access each other's state, and the kernel would interpose security policies (such as same-origin-only requests) between tabs regardless of a tab's behavior. To keep this arrangement transparent to program…

Layout and compositing need to be cross-origin; the Web implicitly allows cross-origin resource loads; and (as was raised above by pcwalton) browsing contexts like windows and frames need to function as if they're running on the same thread and can potentially be shared. All of that is to say that all of the potentially shared state makes it extremely difficult to bind a web origin to a process for security purposes. It's a hard enough problem that a team of Chrome engineers has been working on it for a few years, and are only now approaching an alpha implementation.* And that's many years after Chrome was entirely multi-process with sandboxed web renderer processes.

* http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-iso...

Re: Electrolysis – run web content in a separate process from Firefox

#93

Post by reubano »

This is a main reason I don't use Chrome. Since each tab is running under a sep process, there is no easy way to tell how much total memory is being used. Despite all the improvements, Firefox still has some pretty bad memory leaks and often runs over a gig of memory with just 5 or 6 tabs open. If they go this route, mem leaks will be harder to spot.

Re: Electrolysis – run web content in a separate process from Firefox

#94

Post by kalmi10 »

reubano wrote: post #93

This is a main reason I don't use Chrome. Since each tab is running under a sep process, there is no easy way to tell how much total memory is being used. Despite all the improvements, Firefox still has some pretty bad memory leaks and often runs over a gig of memory with just 5 or 6 tabs open. If they go this route, mem leaks will be harder to spot.

Chrome has a built-in Task Manager (Shift+Esc).

One can even see the memory consumption and CPU usage of each tab and extension.

Re: Electrolysis – run web content in a separate process from Firefox

#95

Post by reubano »

kalmi10 wrote: post #94
reubano wrote: post #93

This is a main reason I don't use Chrome. Since each tab is running under a sep process, there is no easy way to tell how much total memory is being used. Despite all the improvements, Firefox still has some pretty bad memory leaks and often runs over a gig of memory with just 5 or 6 tabs open. If they go this route, mem leaks will be harder to spot.

Chrome has a built-in Task Manager (Shift+Esc). One can even see the memory consumption and CPU usage of each tab and extension.

That doesn't work for me on a mac. But what about total usage? If I have to add up the mem used for each tab it won't be helpful.

Re: Electrolysis – run web content in a separate process from Firefox

#96

Post by grrowl »

reubano wrote: post #95
kalmi10 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome has a built-in Task Manager (Shift+Esc). One can even see the memory consumption and CPU usage of each tab and extension.

That doesn't work for me on a mac. But what about total usage? If I have to add up the mem used for each tab it won't be helpful.

Find it under Window > Task Manager, or detailed memory usage information by navigating to "chrome://memory"

The latter displays total memory usage at the top of the page.

edit: As child poster noted, total memory is overcounted as it seems to be quite difficult to audit exactly what memory is shared within each child process. (see https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25454 )

Re: Electrolysis – run web content in a separate process from Firefox

#97

Post by reubano »

grrowl wrote: post #96
reubano wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't work for me on a mac. But what about total usage? If I have to add up the mem used for each tab it won't be helpful.

Find it under Window > Task Manager, or detailed memory usage information by navigating to "chrome://memory" The latter displays total memory usage at the top of the page. edit: As child poster noted, total memory is overcounted as it seems to be quite difficult to audit exactly what memory is shared within each child process. (see https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25454 )

"Note: This page will show memory use for all running browsers, not just Chrome. (Bug: We seriously overcount our own memory usage: Issue 25454.)"

Re: Electrolysis – run web content in a separate process from Firefox

#98

Post by Animats »

"Electrolysis" finally works? Several years ago, Mozilla gave up on it. This is progress.

Now the question is how tightly locked down the page processes are. Can they access files? Or is all file and persistent state access via some separate process? Done right, each page process should execute in a jail, lacking the privileges to alter external files or persistent state.

Re: Electrolysis – run web content in a separate process from Firefox

#99

Post by possibilistic »

mindcrime wrote: post #75
blueskin_ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>RAM is cheap Great, buy me another 32GB then please . People shouldn't have to have high end gaming rigs to run a sodding browser. Mozilla (and google) are deluding themselves in thinking that their particular software is the be all and end all of a computer, and should be introduced to this strange concept called 'multitasking'. Firefox: 1.5GB Thunderbird: ~1GB OS: 1GB (conservative estimate) Various background pro…

It sucks that you're getting downvoted. I totally agree that this "RAM is cheap" thinking is problematic. Sure, if you only ran one program at a time on a computer, it would make perfect sense. But when I have a finite amount of RAM to spread among a multitude of applications, screaming "RAM is cheap" is bollocks. Never mind that on my current laptop I'm already at the max it can physically support, which means if I…

Sometimes RAM is cheaper than engineer salaries. Sometimes it isn't. It depends on problem domain, scale, and what you're tying to optimize for. Debating this just seems pointless.

In any case, the number one evaluation criterion for browsers is not the RAM profile.

If performance matters that much, perhaps you should instead be asking why we are writing applications and UI in an ugly evolution of SGML.

Before you fault the Moz devs, ask yourself why we have CSS for high DPI images and why designers embed videos into website headers. Maybe your needs aren't at all times reflective of the majority. The browser serves the spec. The spec serves every case you care to imagine. Because that's what we evolved a doc format to do.

(Just imagine a parallel universe where it was instead MS Word that evolved into a facebooking client!)

Re: Electrolysis – run web content in a separate process from Firefox

#100

Post by coldtea »

reubano wrote: post #93

This is a main reason I don't use Chrome. Since each tab is running under a sep process, there is no easy way to tell how much total memory is being used. Despite all the improvements, Firefox still has some pretty bad memory leaks and often runs over a gig of memory with just 5 or 6 tabs open. If they go this route, mem leaks will be harder to spot.

>This is a main reason I don't use Chrome. Since each tab is running under a sep process, there is no easy way to tell how much total memory is being used.

Seeing "how much memory is being used" is a major use case for you using a browser?

If a browsers works fast and doesn't leak memory, one shouldn't care how much memory exactly is used.

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