Hi malware fighters,
There is one crux FF had to bear, and that is memory leaks, memory fragmentation leaks etc.
Test your browser here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=240026When you will have FF 3.0 you can clear internal caches with Stuart Parmenter's RamBack 1.0 (also works in Flock, not in Firefox under 3.0) "like the early data suggests that Mozilla really doesn't leak that much memory at all. But it does thrash the allocator pretty hard and that's what causes the perception of memory leaks."
Over at Pavlov.net another Mozilla developer, Stuart Parmenter, has been doing some really rather impressive and in-depth research to get to the bottom of the memory fragmentation issue. "I've been doing a lot of work trying to figure out why after loading a lot of pages much of your memory seems to disappear" Parmenter reports, adding "why after a while do we end up using more memory than we should be if we aren't leaking and our caches are clear? At least part of it seems to be due to memory fragmentation." One of the things that Parmenter has been doing is looking at how Firefox behaves when, for example, a search page opens up lots of windows with lots of pages. After waiting for all the pages of one such search to open, Parmenter closed them all and then loaded about:blank and ran the RAMBack tool. The resulting heap was 29,999,872 bytes, of which 16,118,072 was being used while the remaining 13,881,800 bytes was in free blocks, and scattered in between tiny used blocks to make matters worse. So it looks as if fragmentation could be the answer after all, with any allocations under 4k going at the end because they cannot be fitted in anywhere earlier. End result, handing big chunks of contiguous memory back to the OS becomes an almost impossible task." info DaniWeb )info:
http://www.pavlov.net/blog/archives/2007/11/memory_fragment.html See:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324081#c17polonus
