[email protected] wrote:
On Fri, 15 Mar 2019 15:23:15 -0700, "David E. Ross"
<[email protected]> in mozilla.support.seamonkey wrote:
On 3/15/2019 8:54 AM, [email protected] wrote:
This morning, in less than 3 hours of running, Seamonkey had taken over
2.5 gig of memory and was climbing. About 8 tabs were open -- including 4
for the application FACEBOOK.
It had frozen and was past the point of graceful shutdown though i might
have been able to do that with about 30 minutes work. (I have before)
Is there a way to make it use less memory? If so, what would it be?
The amount of memory used by any browser reflect the following:
* how many tabs are open
* how complex are the Web pages
* what scripts are running in the Web pages
* what extensions are active
That's always the case with memory usage. In my own usage, I find hangs
and slow response happening when there's a lot of scripting active. I
admit that I run a lot of extensions, but some of them are likely to
have memory leaks. I've also found that if I leave Seamonkey open
overnight, the following morning, the performance is sluggish enough
that it's worth doing a restart.
You had FOUR tabs open just of Facebook! Did you really need all four?
How much memory is required if you have only one tab for Facebook and no
tabs for anything else? How much memory is required if you have four
tabs open but none of them are for Facebook? Were any of your tabs
streaming a video or sound?
I do not use Facebook, so I cannot test what happens with tabs open to
Facebook. With two tabs open to Web pages that automicatically update,
however, I just launched a YouTube streaming video of Tchaikovsky's
Violin Concerto; the memory requirement immediately doubled (but still
less than 260 MB).
I don't use Facebook either, so I've never seen how it behaves on an
individual computer. However, I'm aware that Facebook's architecture is
such that it makes massive consumption of available resources.
I have a friend used to be the IT services director for a college
campus, and he noted to me that at their campus, most of the available
bandwidth disappears between about 5:00 in the afternoon and 2:00 in the
morning, and where most of that is being consumed by connections to
Facebook servers. In a similar way, I know of a particular developing
country that has similar issues at the same times of day. Nearly
everybody in the country (at least those with Internet access) are on
Facebook, and where the saturation is enough that it's pretty much
impossible to use the Internet for anything else.
Let me splain that.
I do not often use the main Facebook "newsfeed".
I use groups. I am probably an active member of a dozen or so.
When i opened Usenet there were three groups available on my "subscribed"
main page.
I use faceook much the same way as i used Usednet for many years previous
What you're actually using Facebook for is mostly irrelevant. Facebook
and Usenet have entirely different architectures. Usenet (and even now,
there's portions that are still functioning) dates back to the late
80's, where everything was simple text, and a significant amount of the
activity was over dial-up modems. Facebook is decades newer, where it's
built on the assumption of ubiquitous broadband, GUI in general, and the
necessary infrastructure to support the World Wide Web. And where
Usenet's model was collaborative and altruistic, Facebook is a
for-profit operation. Perhaps there's a measure of merit in their stated
goal of connecting the entire world together, but underneath that, the
user-level interaction is what fuels an operation of data collection and
analysis, which can be aggregated and analyzed, and subsequently resold
for Facebook's profit.
Thus, when Facebook has been challenged on privacy issues, their
response has, so far, mostly been window dressing, where they make some
token updates as a way of trying to mute the criticism, but where
there's no substantial changes in the way that they do business, and
certainly not in a way that makes a significant change in their revenue
streams.
At this point, further analysis of Facebook is very clearly off-topic
for a discussion of Seamonkey. However, noting that as background helps
explain why use of Facebook may impose performance issues on your use of
Seamonkey.
For you, whether you're using Facebook as a logical replacement for
Usenet, or any other Facebook service, it's all Facebook, and it may be
that the only variable may be how many Facebook services you're
currently accessing. Having more tabs open with Facebook services will
definitely increase that, but you may have considerable usage on even
one or two tabs.
Because I don't have first-hand experience of using Seamonkey, I'm only
guessing, but I think it's probable that you're seeing evidence of what
Facebook actually does while you're connected to it. It's not clear to
me if your memory and CPU usage would go down if you close out some of
those tabs, or not. My experience is that when I get that kind of
behavior that closing active tabs has minimal value, and the only
effective remedy is in restarting Seamonkey. But interacting with
Facebook may be different in that way.
A couple of additional questions come to mind:
- How much RAM do you have in your system, and how many other things do
you have open? If you're operating on 4 GB, then Seamonkey is going to
be taking most of that, especially with Facebook. If you have other
things open, then you're likely hitting memory issues, and where your
computer is doing serious amounts of swapping out to your hard drive.
If you're doing swapping, a hard disk is much slower than RAM, and the
result is going to be noticeable slowness.
- When is the last time you cleared your browser cache? Sometimes that
can help quite a bit, especially with stalled pages. Cache is something
that also dates back to dial-up era, when it made sense to try to
minimize the volume of traffic going over the wire, especially for
content that had already been downloaded.
In modern usage, cache is much less important, partly because of the
speed of connections, but also because of content that's being
constantly updated, and where there's less content that can be re-used
from the cache. In my own usage, I find no noticeable performance loss
from running a much smaller cache than the default, nor of regular cache
flushes. And for hung processes, clearing the cache and reloading the
entire page can make a real difference.
Although I'm not advocating for it, I do know that I've seen people note
that they set browser caches to 0. For you, you might try experimenting
with a smaller cache.
- You might also want to consider what you might accomplish with
NoScript. That's not necessarily a trivial thing to do, because it
takes tinkering to figure out what scripting you want running (and in
fact, is essential) and where blocking scripting simply mutes stuff that
doesn't need to be running, at least for your usage. With Facebook,
there's a lot of scripting that they're doing with data collection and
analysis, and it may be that blocking some of that may cut down on the
demand for resources.
The four tabs were 3 groups and my notifications.
Consider disabling notifications -- those are processes that do run,
taking up memory and bandwidth. Not having them active reduces the
demand on your resources.
With that in mind, one of the things that you probably need to be doing
is prioritizing your use, so that you've decided what parts of Facebook
are essential to you, and what are simply nice features that you could
live without. For something like notifications, they may be nice to
have, but it could be that turning them off might lower the demand that
Facebook is making, and where the result is that you have more resources
to apply to what you really want, and where you're wasting less on
low-priority stuff.
A general principle of economics is that a resource that is perceived to
be unlimited will tend to be abused. From what I've seen of Facebook
that is applicable in this case, and if you're using Facebook, they'll
use all the resources that you make available to them, especially if you
tend use lots of features (or don't opt out of stuff that you don't need).
Smith
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