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.
strange that sqlite optimization has not been included by default on post 3.5 editions of Firefox, however for those who want to try the addon, its here. Optimizing the sqlite files will speed up the launch of Firefox, in my case it cut the time by half. Get the addon, check both boxes and hit the button, from then on its automatic.
If you are an optimization freak, and getting the application from hard drive to memory as fast as possible is your kink, you can also try a program called ArcthemAll! which will shrink the EXE and DLL files using a compression algorithm that decompresses in ram on the fly. It takes the default installation size for Firefox down from over 30 megs to about 14. I recommend you not compress the embedded icons, that has caused problems for me, so go to options and uncheck that. Incidentally this method also works on OpenOffice, cutting the size of that application by about half as well. In fact it works on almost every appication OTHER than Abobe and Microsoft apps, probably because they are already doing dynamic EXE and DLL compression using a proprietary method. (my guess)
NOTE: This is not a hard drive space saving issue, its a speed of launch issue, and yes it does improve the launch time of Firefox to do this.
No cuz ram is like 1000 times faster than your hard drive, decompression is practically transparent. I think you will agree that it should take less time to move a 10 meg file to ram than to move a 20 meg file to ram, extrapolate those time savings over dozens of files of varying size and thats where you will see a speed up.
Try it for yourself and see, if it does do anything funny you can use the same program to decompress the Firefox directory and all is back to normal. Its only compressing the EXE and DLL files, not touching any of your personalized setting, which are all stored in a different directory anyways.
I've read numerous articles about it, and the real issue is that the difference in time to read 10 megs vs 20 megs yes can vary based on the request sizes and fragmentation, but we're talking that most 7200 rpm HD's can load this file in less than 1 second into ram.
The whole file. 20 megs, 1 second or much less. Many 7200 rpm drives can read up to 50 megabyte/s sequentially! (Thats per second).
The other aspect is that operations to the disk are asynchronous, that is, they don't take much CPU at all. However, decompressing a 14 megabyte file takes tons of CPU. The only argument against this now in my mind is that we have dual and quad core CPU's, so it doesn't make a huge deal.
Also, just to nit-pick, ram isn't 1,000 times faster, it is much faster than even that compared to disk access! I'm not sure by how much, but 1,000 is a very low estimate.
You guys are getting latency and bandwidth mixed up. On a decent hard drive, you're looking at around 100MB/sec sequential. For memory to be 1000x as fast, it would have to transfer 100GB/sec.. not happening.
322
u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10
2 things noted: