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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

#311

Post by creshal »

derefr wrote: post #309
creshal wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ESXi has never had a security vulnerability due to this optimization, AFAIK. Should be vulnerable to FFS, if I'm not mistaken: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/new-attack-steals-pr...

True! Rowhammer-based attacks are kind of unique, though; I expect they'll be treated as a hardware bug and solved by releasing better hardware, rather than through inventing even more layers of securinoia to keep in mind from now on. It's sort of like when WebGL was first getting going, and the GPUs of the time didn't expect to be fed shaders directly from potentially-malicious web sources. Rather than severely rest…

> I expect they'll be treated as a hardware bug and solved by releasing better hardware

When Rowhammer was first announced, people said "it's okay, we have ECC". Then ECC was shown vulnerable. "It's okay, vendors have promised to fix it in DDR4", they said. Now DDR4 is out and vendors have not deployed the fixes systematically[1] and you have to benchmark every single RAM stick to make sure you're not vulnerable.

I'd really appreciate software workarounds as long as hardware vendors keep fucking up.

[1]: http://www.passmark.com/forum/memtest86/5395-rowhammer-mitig...

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

#312

Post by Manishearth »

jayflux wrote: post #310
Manishearth wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I (hopefully) think this is what Servo is and will end up being. Not really the plan. Servo may eventually become a product, but that would be in the very far future. But Gecko can use lessons learned from Servo, and try to share code with it, so you can incrementally replace parts of Gecko. > and has no interest in supporting Windows XP. I don't think that's the case? We don't have users on XP so we may not suppor…

> Not really the plan. Yup, hence my "hopefully", I'm aware small parts of servo may go into Gecko incrementally, however im still routing for something like browserhtml to be at a usable state, and for servo to run on its own. > I don't think that's the case? PR link https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/1908 https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2vg0g1/this_week_in_s... It might be worth making it clear what Servo…

Well, that was 2014. And yes, there's not much interest in putting the effort to support XP now.

That is because Servo is currently not a product. You said "I (hopefully) think this is what Servo is and will end up being.", which talks of a future where Servo is a product (which can happen, though it would be in the far future). In such a case Servo would reevaluate supporting XP (unless it is so far in the future that XP support is no longer important, in which case most probably other browsers will drop XP support too). I say it in that comment too, "we're currently a research project" and "If/when we stop being a research project, maybe, but I doubt it". I'm less doubtful now, but yes, it's possible that Servo would continue not supporting XP as a product if there was a good enough reason for it.

The reason Servo doesn't support XP is not because Servo is Servo, it's because Servo is not a product.

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

#313

Post by znpy »

smcl wrote: post #305
srean wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your 112 and raise you a 875. FF worked just fine that too with just a less than 1 GB of RAM. I had to block flash, hand tune some of the cache sizes and have a tab uloader etc. No other browser seemed capable of handling my rather unique use case.

If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing that you have 875 tabs open? How are you able to keep track of what you opened, and where etc? I tend to feel anxious and unfocussed when I've got over a dozen or so open - at which point i'll dump some "I'd like to read this" articles into a bookmarks folder which I work through in my down-time, and clean out periodically.

I would like to spend some words saying how good is the tab-unloading thing.

I have an extension that basically unloads a tab (I guess it freezes the state and serializes it to disk) and frees its ram.

It works very well, so well I'd love to use it on my phone too.

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

#314

Post by znpy »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #241
smsm42 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What has Waterfox so special? I skimmed it's homepage but it only says "we're fast!", doesn't explain how and why though.

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

#315

Post by lloeki »

AstralStorm wrote: post #304
lloeki wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Duplicated memory and just overhead from running separate processes fork(2) does COW. With careful design† forking a new process only results in new and modified pages being not shared. † Hard! But single-process threads + security is hard too. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/58145/how-does-copy-...

Only on Linux, POSIX does not mandate CoW and Windows does not have a similar API.

While not mandatory, I always sort of assumed BSD and Darwin do the same...

Just wanted to point out that memory usage isn't necessarily inherent to multiprocess, but with a sizable portion of users on Windows the point is practically moot anyway.

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

#316

Post by srean »

derefr wrote: post #279
srean wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With applications written in javascript ? Stateful on the client side alone or stateful on both sides ? It wont be safe to assume that state is persisted transparently on the server side. May be they just cache it for a while. To make this work reliably would be quite difficult.

You could be really conservative: only assume statelessness if the page has no elements and has no calls to the XMLHTTPRequest API (or window.eval). Or you could be really conservative: only assume statelessness for pages without forms and without any Javascript . (These do exist!)

> These do exist

We have seen things people wouldn't believe. Webpages without any Javascript. Webpages using correct http responses. Watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, here come the transpilers

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

#317

Post by Sylos »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #204

I don't know. "Eating up all my ram" seems perfectly acceptable to me at first glance. I purchase ram and use it in my computer for expressly this purpose: to improve the responsiveness and snappiness of programs. Where do you draw the line at what's acceptable use of ram and what's not? I have 32G on my desktop, is it unacceptable that chrome is using 8G?

The question is how sensibly Chrome uses those 8 GB of RAM. We are very much still at the point where (most likely) not your entire hard drive + whatever data is generated on the fly or loaded from a webpage fits into your RAM. As such the often repeated statement that "unused RAM is wasted RAM" is still nonsense. There is always something which could be cached in RAM and would provide a speed-up of some form. If Chrome reserves 8 GB of that for itself, then it should utilize that in some form, so that it's used more sensibly than it could be used by other programs.

For example, Chrome could keep a hundred pages from your browsing history cached in RAM, so that when you go back, it loads that instantly. That is a speed-up, but you probably will never go back one hundred pages in a row. So, another program could almost certainly use the RAM more sensibly than Chrome, if that was the case.

And what Dotzler is referring to, is the worst kind of offense. If his promise holds true, Firefox's implementation will be just as good as Chrome's in terms of speed, but will use less RAM. Which would mean that Chrome is using some RAM without providing a speed-up, i.e. actually wasting that RAM. And that is always unacceptable.

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

#318

Post by srean »

smcl wrote: post #305
srean wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your 112 and raise you a 875. FF worked just fine that too with just a less than 1 GB of RAM. I had to block flash, hand tune some of the cache sizes and have a tab uloader etc. No other browser seemed capable of handling my rather unique use case.

If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing that you have 875 tabs open? How are you able to keep track of what you opened, and where etc? I tend to feel anxious and unfocussed when I've got over a dozen or so open - at which point i'll dump some "I'd like to read this" articles into a bookmarks folder which I work through in my down-time, and clean out periodically.

There are extensions that can search the body of the open but out of view tabs.

I have commented at length why I use so many open tabs. Basically that's my cache-to-do-list. Once I revisit certain tabs enough times they get upgraded to a bookmark. What bookmarks don't do well but tabs do marvelously is preserve the trajectory and context of how I arrived at the page. Very useful to recreate the state when I visit it later.

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

#319

Post by mschwaig »

nl wrote: post #7

I 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'…

Did you try updating your graphics driver or disabling hardware acceleration (about:preferences#advanced)?

I had an issue but on Windows 10 where sometimes on video playback FF would just lock up and windows would restart the graphics driver. I also couldn't reliably reproduce it, it sounds like a similar problem.

This is my bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280706

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

#320

Post by reitanqild »

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

It's not the RAM for me (I have 16GB).

It is about things like harrassing my CPU multiple times a minute after my search results have loaded (looking angrily at you googlers, google was the worst offender here it seems! (Windows 10, FF))

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