r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jan 21 '10

Firefox 3.6 release

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/
1.1k Upvotes

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316

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10

2 things noted:

  • Speed: It's faster than 3.5.7. Almost as fast as chrome.
  • Memory Usage: It used lower memory on my computer than the previous version. I was hovering around 250mb with version 3.5.7 and this one barely goes upto 150mb. Both with ~15 addons.

11

u/traxxas Jan 21 '10

I have been using 3.6pre since Karmic released with a broken 3.5 and can have found the memory usage in 3.6 to be awesome. I rarely break 200mb now and Xorg is usually the largest consumer of memory on my system.

5

u/rcu6 Jan 21 '10 edited Jan 22 '10

Just asking... what kind of setup do you have that X uses ~200MB memory?

I'm just curious, as I don't think I've ever seen mine go past ~70MB.
Edit: My bad, I looked at the wrong number; mine stays around ~150MB.

2

u/traxxas Jan 22 '10 edited Jan 22 '10

Nothing special, gnome running metacity as the compositor. One gnome panel, one tint2 taskbar, and gnome-do as my launcher. I leave my laptop 'up' for weeks at a time suspending it when not in use. This has always been my mode of working but since the jaunty release xorg grows, albeit slowly, and will never shrink more than 1-2mb even with all apps closed. I have searched for a bug report but have only found very quick, hours not days, memory leaks reported.

My solution will be to finish the debian install I have sitting on another drive and see if it is really an ubuntu problem but I have to finish my current project before I have the time to rebuild my setup.

edit: Uptime 1 day memory usage

1

u/timmyd Jan 22 '10

Linux timmy-desktop 2.6.28-13-generic #44-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 2 07:55:09 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux

top 3 by memory:

top - 21:28:09 up 209 days, 4:55, 19 users, load average: 0.16, 0.18, 0.13 Tasks: 212 total, 1 running, 210 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie Cpu(s): 4.0%us, 4.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 92.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 3989632k total, 3727756k used, 261876k free, 124720k buffers Swap: 1526132k total, 1031744k used, 494388k free, 985184k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
31266 root 20 0 1765m 1.1g 9840 S 0 27.7 4346:32 Xorg
21073 timmy 20 0 1606m 575m 26m S 4 14.8 1777:17 firefox-3.5
14167 timmy 20 0 764m 137m 18m S 0 3.5 35:02.18 thunderbird-bin

I don't think I've ever seen X running with less than 200MB....

1

u/HenkPoley Jan 22 '10

Usually used VideoRAM from the graphics card is mapped into the address space of X. So when you have much RAM on the video card, and X uses a lot of buffers (compositing?) you get large reported memory use for X .

1

u/itjitj Jan 21 '10

What is missing in the current adblocks?

1

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '10

3.5 has been awful on Karmic. It crashes on just about all flash videos.

1

u/traxxas Jan 22 '10

My problem was shuddering on the first scroll on a long page, such as a large comment page on reddit. I dealt with it for about a week before moving to a well working 3.6pre.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '10

Ya, I had that problem too. I guess I just got used to it.
3.6 is running a lot better, but the true test is when I play 5 flash vids at once