[rescue] Mozilla Firefox

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sun, 25 Apr 2004 @ 01:05 -0400, Dave McGuire said:

> On Apr 21, 2004, at 10:15 PM, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> >>>I run Netscape 7.1 right now, because it leaks memory slower than
> >>>Mozilla 1.6.
> >>>
> >>>But really... why should *any* browser use more than around 32MB?
> >>>
> >>>What on Earth are they doing?
> >>
> >>  In the case of Mozilla, its entire user interface is built from
> >>compiled-in, run-time-interpreted JavaScript.  It's like some kid
> >>decided he wanted to show off how "clever" he was.  Fucking morons.
> >
> >Do you think that is why it eats so much memory?
> 
>   No, I think that's why it's so blasted slow.

OK.  I was just thinking of how many times JavaScript/ECMA has had
memory leaks in the past.

There were certain versions of Netscape back in the day that would leak
memory just sitting there if you enabled JavaScript.

>   Yeeesh.  If not memory leaks, perhaps memory fragmentation?  If one 
> isn't using a low-fragmentation malloc() implementation, malloc() arena 
> fragmentation can really hose you...if the malloc() code keeps needing 
> to call sbrk() to increase the arena size rather than coalescing 
> smaller blocks into larger ones upon calls to free().

That's a possibility.

Did you see my post about the large number of deleted shared memory
areas mapped into the address space of firefox?

>   The old system-supplied malloc() that came with NetBSD in the 1.3 
> days is particularly bad about this, I can say from personal experience 
> and a remaining anal burning sensation.  I solved that problem very 
> effectively by replacing it with a package called "dlmalloc" which you 
> may have heard of.

It might be worthwhile to create a small wrapper library for dlmalloc
and force the application to use that instead of the system malloc.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The strength of the Constitution lies
entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it.  Only if every
single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the
constitutional rights secure." -- Albert Einstein]