Apparently, though unproven, at 07:45 on Sunday 19 September 2010, Lie Ryan did opine thusly:
> On 09/19/10 09:22, Hilco Wijbenga wrote: > > On 18 September 2010 15:14, Kevin O'Gorman <kogor...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Is it just me? Or does Firefox get slower every release? And less > >> stable. > > > > Indeed. But FF4 is *much* faster. And much more stable. At least, that > > was my experience when I tried it out. I had to go back to 3.6 because > > some of the plugins that I need were not yet supported for FF4. At > > least the later 3.6 releases aren't as unstable as the previous ones. > > Firefox 4 indeed is smoother (probably due to the new animations, > probably because none of the plugins I used are compatible yet, but > maybe it is just faster); but it is definitely more memory hungrier than > before. In Fx3, it usually took around ~20-25% of my 1GB RAM and that's > with opening a bunch lot of pages; Fx4 generally takes around ~25-30%. > > While taking 30% of my RAM is fine when I'm not multitasking, the main > problem is I am always multitasking. With Thunderbird taking another > 15-20%, emerge ranging from 5-30%, and X about 5-10%, my computer is > becoming unbearably slow when memory starved. > > I've been thinking about adding -Os (optimize-size) to my CFLAGS, does > anyone knows if doing that will possibly bring down memory usage and > speed up the computer? No it will not. It's the size of the binary code image that is reduced, you may find that the firefox *code* in memory is smaller too. But it will do nothing for the data structures firefox creates to do it's job. Think of it this way: You have a MySQL instance taking up say 20MB in memory. You use it to access a 500G database so it uses a whopping amount of memory for the indexes. You somehow optimize MySQL so that the code is now 19MB. What effect does that have on the 500G database? Answer: none whatsoever. And you conclusions about memory usage are wrong too. When free says you have 1G or RAM (this is true) and top says Thunderbird uses 150M and Firefox 180M, together they do not use 330M. Much of that memory is shared. top tells you "amount of memory that this process can access" top does not tell you "amount of memory that this process owns and that nothing else can access" -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
