Windows Low Fragmentation Heap builds
As promised, some Minefield beta 1 Windows builds with the low fragmentation heap turned on.
These are built off of the beta1 branch. Beta 1 isn’t out so this isn’t final use at your own risk blah blah blah.
I am curious to hear how these compare memory use wise to other builds for people.
I’m working on putting together an extension (maybe updating RAMBack) to let you produce pretty heap images but I’m not there yet. Stay tuned for that.
Tags: firefox, leaks, memory fragmentation, Mozilla, performance
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November 14, 2007 at 9:57 am
I’ve been using this build all morning, and even pushed hard it stays around 130-150MB RAM (after starting at ~40MB). Closing pages even decreases memory use!
I haven’t been able to test Firebug, which I’m sure drives up memory use in normal Firefox builds. Firebug 1.1 beta works with 3.0a8, but I can’t get it to activate in this build.
Pete.
November 14, 2007 at 1:32 pm
Thanks for the results! I’ve got my binary component for heap dumping almost done. The code is written just having some packaging issues. Will get it out by tomorrow at the latest.
November 15, 2007 at 4:00 am
I tried my Browser Mem Buster Test https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=240026 which simulates hours of browser usage. The regular Firefox 3 trunk build uses 122 MB after running the test and closing all but one tab. The special Firefox 3 beta 1 build uses 131 MB after exactly the same test. My opinion is that any perceived decrease in memory use is a placebo effect. I’ll post more results in this MozillaZine thread: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=429446
November 15, 2007 at 7:36 am
Pete, how does that compare with a normal Firefox 3 Beta 1 build?
November 15, 2007 at 4:23 pm
@Jesse: Sorry, I don’t have a regular trunk 3.0b1 build to test with.
I did try testing with 3.0a8, just a couple (10) pages quickly ran memory up to ~190MB and rising. Long-running Flash apps (Pandora, etc) seem to really eat up memory.
This special build (again, I don’t have a regular 3.0b1 build) consistently keeps memory around 120-130MB with the same set of pages, even with Pandora running.
November 16, 2007 at 9:29 am
Pete,
Could you list those pages that quickly ran through memory? If I can reproduce a problem, I’ll file a bug report. By Pandora, do you mean pandora.com Pandora Radio? If so, I’m trying that now to see if I can reproduce a memory problem with the latest Firefox 3 nightly and Shockwave Flash 9.0 r47 on Windows XP.
November 16, 2007 at 10:24 am
After running Pandora Radio for over an hour (until it asked me to register) memory use hit a high of 118 MB. After closing all tabs but one open to the default home page, memory use is down to 50 MB. Long-running Flash apps don’t seem to be a problem for the regular Firefox 3 nightly builds, at least on Windows XP and with the latest Flash Player.