Sunday 2 June 2013

Amazon 'funny' items + Firefox memory usage

In a moment of boredom, I searched google for funny items on
Amazon - theres lots of such web summary pages - and the humor
is in the customer reviews. The customer reviews on Amazon are
very useful - sometimes, even educational - knowing what can go
wrong for a product can be more important than the headline grabbing
"features".

For additional amusement, you can search for the most expensive
(usually mispriced) items on Amazon.

Which takes me to here:

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-ram

I cannot tell if this is an April fool piece of humor or they
actually think it is helpful.

I run firefox on my Android phone and my laptop. I dont understand
why firefox uses 3GB of RAM on my laptop to do "nothing much" (I have
a variety of tabs open and I appreciate web pages use a lot
of memory). It would be interesting to set an upper limit
on FF, and not find its memory use swing hugely depending on the
web pages I visit.

If you read the link above, it explains that certain plugins
may use a lot of memory and to try disabling them, to see if the
safe mode of firefox is any better. I am trying to imagine what the
average non developer, would do having followed that instruction.

The funniest recommendation on that page:


Are you able add to more memory to the computer?
Memory is cheap and will provide a huge performance boost.


Yes, memory is cheap. I have 8GB RAM - I wish I could install 16 or 32GB,
but, Firefox, how much memory am I using? What is causing it? (JSON? Images,
CSS?)? And how can I flush memory use.

On Android - *all* web browsers are poor in terms of caching - the
browsers will reload (and hence use valuable data bandwidth) because the caching
is extreme (ie they dont do any), to conserve memory. But on the desktop,
it appears to be the other way around - use up memory til the system
is swapping heavily and a forced restart is needed.

I ran "about:memory" on my browser - and this is very useful, but maybe
this should show the memory as a hierarchy based on the open tabs
and hidden tabs. (The memory tree shows the windows but in a way
that is not easy to decide what is the correct course of action).

Maybe google's sub-process based window tabs is better?


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