Firefox and /usr/share/icons/oxygen/icon-theme.cache

I have been having problems with Firefox in recent times. I cant
login to gmail - I can tediously delete the google cookies, but
as I reported before, the internet is awash with this solution
and neither Google or Firefox are clued up on the real cause of the
problem. It really is disastrous. Firefox is barely better than
the other very poor browsers out there, and now that doesnt work.
And I really dont want to use Chrome - as that is the worst
browsing usability of the (too few) browsers out there.

Another issue I have with firefox is the sheer size of the process.
3GB for a browser before I have done anything is really amazing.
Especially given that on a mobile phone, I can run happily in a few
hundred KB (using Dolphin browser - my current favorite, although
Opera is better on mobile). Again, avoid Chrome. Because there are
so few config options which any/all of the browsers do, to optimise
mobile bandwidth.

Anyway I was trying to figure out why the browser is so huge.
I tried doing a "pmap" on the firefox process, and I found
the file, named in the title, responsible for *144MB* of memory
use. Sure, the file is likely mmapped, but thats huge. What the heck
is in that files? Obviously icons. But why does firefox need that file?

So I chmod 000 the file and that shaves a significant memory from firefox.
But if you look at the memory usage, it looks like firefox is using
hugepages to mmap all the shlibs. It really is depressing that firefox
wants a large memory footprint and I am looking at what else can be pruned.
Actually, on closer examination, it appears there is a 2MB unreadable
guard page after the text section of each shared library is loaded.

If I sort the memory sections into order, heres the top N segments

  26624K rw---   [ anon ]
  26624K rw---   [ anon ]
  57992K r-x-- libxul.so
  65540K rw-s- pulse-shm-839350638
  66484K r---- icon-theme.cache
  66484K r---- icon-theme.cache
  83996K r---- icon-theme.cache
  83996K r---- icon-theme.cache
 162816K rw---   [ anon ]

Those icon caches seem to correspond to these two files:

 83996 -rw-r--r-- 1 root fox   86010324 Apr 20 14:37 /usr/share/icons/gnome/icon-theme.cache
 66484 -rw-r--r-- 1 root fox   68076920 May 10 17:52 /usr/share/icons/hicolor/icon-theme.ca

Thats another 300MB of memory use.

At the moment, my firefox is 1.37GB in size - 361MB resident in memory,
which is not bad really.



Post created by CRiSP v11.0.32a-b6741