On 09/19/10 19:04, Dale wrote: > Alan McKinnon wrote: >> 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" >> >> > > Yep. I use Seamonkey which is browser and email all in one. It doesn't > use much when I first start it up. The amount it accumulates as time > goes on depends on the websites I go to. If I go to sites that have a > lot of flash, pictures and gifs, then it starts to using a lot more > memory. If I go to say the gentoo forums which is mostly text, it > doesn't change much.
When I'm doing emerge or other things, I usually switches to Epiphany, dillo, or links; depending on how unbearable things becomes. > Just like the example Alan gave, it's not the program itself that is > using the memory, it's what you are doing with it that uses memory. I > have found that the weather radar site and youtube are the biggest > memory hogs. I'm opening mostly standard HTML pages (gmail, static pages, etc) and the memory usage is still quite bad. > This is my Seamonkey with email also open and I have only visited a > couple forums sites: > > 7493 dale 20 0 253m 133m 28m S 0.7 6.6 1:59.65 seamonkey-bin Incidentally, I've found that browsing using Thunderbrowse extension in Thunderbird is much more memory friendly than using Firefox itself (Thunderbird still uses around 15-20% memory, compared to 20-30% that Firefox uses). If only Thunderbrowse's interface is not so buggy...
