How much extra memory is now used by it? All this improvement is meaningless if it hits swap on a typical machine.
We saw about 20% overhead going from one process to two.
Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness
121–130 of 346 posts
Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness
#122Ah, so because I use addons I might not be seeing these benefits for some time? Good to know. Chrome is right now way faster for me, but I prefer using FF so I am in the Mozilla camp right now. Eager to see this rolled out. Early versions of e10s were very fragile and not so usable for me, so I switched it off.
I use quite a few add-ons and my e10 was disabled because of them. I force enabled e10 using Mozilla's guide https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Force_Enable and didn't notice anything breaking (yet).
Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness
#123Its 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. Check out Servo: https://servo.org/
Servo is "just" a new rendering engine, though, not a whole browser.
Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firebug is quite often the culprit in these kinds of things in my experience. I can't live without it so I put up with it; if you're switching from Chrome however, it seems that you'd be better off just using the built-in inspection.
Have you given the built-in Firefox dev tools a try? If so, what did you feel was missing?
Also worth pointing out that the built in tools have a Firebug theme in the settings.
Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funniest thing is that FF memory usage didn't go down that much. For me it is even higher.
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.
For a reference point on scaling, on a Windows 7 machine that hasn't been shutdown in a week or two, I have a long-running Firefox session with 5 windows and 80-something tabs, and I'm at 1.7 GB. Half a GB of that is being consumed by the Google Music player.
Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness
#126I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…
This seems atypical. Given that you don't use any add-ons, consider resetting your profile. Alternatively, you may wish to disable multi-process for the time being if it's enabled for you (I'm sure there's a flag you can set for that if you Google for it), or upgrade to the beta or alpha builds. In my experience, the beta/alpha builds are usually plenty stable to be a daily driver.
To reset go to about:support and click on the button in the top right. A prompt will appear telling you what it’s going to do.
Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.
Except mobile hardware which does not. Power usage is always a concern.
>Except mobile hardware which does not.
Source?
RAM available in mobile phones seems to grow exponentially [1]. Power efficency of processors also seems to grow exponentially [2] (does anybody have a source for ARM processors?).
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/AWkmMJc.png (note logarithmic scale) [2]: https://www.karlrupp.net/2013/06/cpu-gpu-and-mic-hardware-ch...
Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness
#128I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…
Firefox is frustratingly slow for me. I can't use it, have to stick to Chrome. Chrome which, by the way, crashes after 5 minutes of using video Hangouts and brings my 16 gigabytes ram PC to a halt when I open too many youtube tabs. But firefox scrolling is especially slow. irccloud.com is the main culprit (and I use irccloud a lot). It's pretty bad in gmail as well. The react app my team is working on is also far slo…
That last link looks about the same to me in Chrome dev and Firefox nightly, for what it's worth.
Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness
#129Ah, so because I use addons I might not be seeing these benefits for some time? Good to know. Chrome is right now way faster for me, but I prefer using FF so I am in the Mozilla camp right now. Eager to see this rolled out. Early versions of e10s were very fragile and not so usable for me, so I switched it off.
I use quite a few add-ons and my e10 was disabled because of them. I force enabled e10 using Mozilla's guide https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Force_Enable and didn't notice anything breaking (yet).
thanks, I've turned it on; I'll see how it goes.
Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness
#130I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…
I've been a long time Firefox user (due to multi-row tab extension -- can't live without it). I can easily have 120 tabs open when doing research. Firefox has always been relatively performant even with that huge number of tabs visible and I almost never have to close it.
However, something recently has changed. Firefox will work fine and then something will cause it use a large amount of CPU that it doesn't let go of even after closing all the tabs. I have to close the whole browser and re-open it. This can happen a few times a day.
I'm hoping it's a regression that will be fixed soon.