Fixes to memory footprint and garbage collection arrive in Firefox 7

Post by sjwright » Tue, Jul 05, 2011, 8:53 PM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #34

mbrubeck wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll also ship this week to around 100,000 users who are already on the Aurora channel, and in just six weeks to literally millions of users on the beta channel. Firefox is an open source project. Part of our mission is to enable participation by the community, and that requires doing our work in the open and talking about it in public.

> Part of our mission is to enable participation by the community, and that requires doing our work in the open and talking about it in public. I completely respect that, and I have nothing against your philosophy whatsoever. However, I assume that Mozilla provides those who prefer to stay up to date using the dev builds with information about significant releases via other channels. Moreover, while Firefox obviously…

Post by anygregor » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 1:22 AM UTC

tomp wrote: post #32

sedev wrote: post #26

While the improvements they're promising are certainly a Good Thing, one bit jumps out at me: "introduced a significantly improved about:memory page with buttons that can manually trigger garbage collection (GC) and cycle collection (CC)... hitting these buttons repeatedly — or by hitting “Minimize memory usage”, which triggers both processes three times in a row — you can reduce Firefox 6′s memory footprint signific…

If you had read the bug report and the discussion below it, you'd know that chunks of virtual memory (VM) are not freed to the OS immediately after they are empty, but are only freed after 3 GCs. That's actually an optimization; allocating VM is expensive, and doing it just after you've freed some is plain stupid. The problem with GCs is not that they don't actually work , it's that they are suited to a specific task…