[geeks] And The Linux Weenies Wonder Why They Aren't Mainstream...`

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 @ 20:08 -0600, Micah R Ledbetter said:

> I'll believe that. Having it kill your machine, though... my first  
> guess would be that something *else* is wrong, and Firefox is  
> contributing to it. I'm not speaking authoritativly, though, just  
> giving my anecdotals.

No, nothing at all is wrong.

The system starts paging as the app needs bits of those hundreds of MB, and
that causes a lot of slow paging activity.

It's perfectly normal for that to happen on a system with VM.

Stop using the offending app, and most good OS will swap much of it out
and you'll be fine until you hit it again.

The problem occurs when you are using multiple apps yourself (human
multitasking), or when several apps all work together, meaning they all are
causing memory pressure.

For example, doing WWW development, I might be hitting a 400MB image of
Firefox while also updating documentation, and doing my editing work.

If Firefox is causing a lot of paging, the system slows down.

> I've read that minimizing then restoring FF - at least on Windows -  
> clears its RAM and can be a workaround for memory leaks. I don't know  
> if it works under Linux like that, though.

Um, no.  UNIX processes grow until they reach their plateau allocation
size.

The exception would be those which are written to call unmap() on allocated
memory ranges.

Also, I've not seen that help with Firefox in Windows either, though it
is smaller than the UNIX version.

Still, even on Windows Firefox can grow pretty large.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["It's a damn poor mind that can only think
of one way to spell a word." -- Andrew Jackson]