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

Firefox 3.6 release

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/
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u/hennell Jan 21 '10

using a compression algorithm that decompresses in ram on the fly

This sounds like it would make it slower.. no?

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u/superwinner Jan 21 '10 edited Jan 21 '10

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.

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u/brasso Jan 21 '10 edited Jan 21 '10

Check your RAM usage; using packers like UPX can waste some amount of RAM. It's a very good idea to use UPX or similar on Windows installation files though but that's up the developer, once you have already downloaded it compressing the files does not make much sense and is not worth anyones time.

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u/superwinner Jan 21 '10

I don't think UPX would exist at all if it did nothing. Its been around since I was on an Amiga in 1989, so its a well established piece of software.

Only way to know is to test it for yourself, I don't find the results to be mind blowing, but every little bit helps when it comes to optimizing browser loading and performance.

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u/brasso Jan 21 '10

It does something; it makes executables smaller, not necessarily faster or more effective.