[geeks] OSX Server

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 @ 11:05 -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke said:

> On Tue, 15 Mar 2005, velociraptor wrote:
> 
> >Anyone else noticed that Firefox is not quite stable under OS X?  If I
> >open "Manage Bookmarks" and search, I can make it crash every time.
> 
> Web browsing on the Macintosh is in as sorry a state as web-browsing on
> Unix, VMS, or Windows.  Camino and Safari tend to spin the CPU doing a
> bunch of nothing.  IE is outdated and sluggish.  Mozilla is bloated as
> sin.  Firefox crashes all the time.

I hear you screaming.

Web browsers absolutely suck, and few people seem to notice.

I've had Mozilla and Firefox both, on Windows and UNIX systems, eat
200-300 megs of RAM before, and I'm hardly alone.

You'd think fixing this would be a high priority task.

One thing I've noticed on UNIX systems is that Mozilla/Firefox seem to
frequently create shared memory areas which seem to never be released.

Otherwise, I don't really know why they use so much memory, but my guess
is that their cache system never releases unused objects in some cases.

Recently Firefox seems to never go over around 150MB, but that's still
far too high.

Aside: Firefox alone isn't the problem, it's problems are in nearly
every project out there.

For example, I've been running Gnome for about two years now, trying to
give it a long term test, with some KDE interruptions now and then to
check on that project.

Gnome is now finally usable, but still buggy, and is a tremendous
resource hog, far above and beyond that which is reasonable for what it
provides.

Just some information on memory consumption on my system right now:

    Nautilus (the file browser) 	    56MB
    Firefox				    108MB
    Thunderbird (Mozilla E-Mail)	    56MB
    GThumb (image viewer/organizer)	    134MB
    Beep (media player)			    41MB
    Weather applet			    26MB 
    Mixer applet (basic volume control)	    24MB

Granted, there is a lot of shared memory.  For example, the mixer applet
is sharing 4MB.  But this is still beyond merely bloated, this is
absolutely tragic.

So you see, sometimes I hardly notice that Firefox has memory
problems...