[Discuss] memory management

[peabo at peabo.com (Peter Olson)]

> On June 25, 2015 at 4:39 PM Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 03:13:13PM -0400, Matthew Gillen wrote:
> > I'll chime in on this one more time just to be clear about what my beef
> > with linux is here.  Several people have said, in effect, "Have more
> > RAM" or "Have enough RAM for what you need".  Which is obviously true,
> > but missing the point.
>
> ...
>
> If you browse daily, and browsing is causing your problem, then it
> seems clear to me that you do not. ;-)  But I use firefox daily, leave
> it up for WEEKS at a time, and don't have the problems you are
> describing, so I think it must be something about your particular
> usage patterns... Like maybe visiting sites that put too much garbage
> on a page, or some such.  I certainly have seen THAT--it's usually
> sites that have one seemingly endless page of content, with multiple
> (or even tens) of flash ads.  Don't visit those sites. ;-)  Or, maybe
> your system is woefully out of date.

Blaming the victim is unproductive.

What I know is that for years Firefox has consumed all of the CPU time and
progressively all of the memory of the machine until I kill it.

A few years ago, this was a disaster but now Firefox will offer to reopen the
pages I had open prior to the crash.  I do that, and there is no crisis of CPU
or memory.  For a while, perhaps not too soon.

Javascript seems to be the bad boy here: all those pages that are not front are
probably looping Javascript stuff draining the CPU.  That would account for the
CPU being pegged at 100%.  I am ignorant of the API for pages not at front, so I
cannot comment further.

Folklore says that that Firefox has had memory leaks for years, maybe at this
point dozens of years.

Who will fix this?

Do the developers test the case of multiple URLs open, perhaps dozens at a time,
over long periods of time?

Maybe that's why these problems don't get fixed.

Peter Olson