[Gllug] back on the linux front

[Mike Brodbelt]

- Tethys wrote:
> On 4/13/07, Jason Clifford <jason at ukfsn.org> wrote:
> 
>> Are you sure you don't have a problem with your RAM or do you have lots of
>> extra processes running?
>>
>> 512M is an enormous amount of RAM.
> 
> On my 2GB desktop:
> 
> mrburns:~% free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:       2054608    1992324      62284          0     302356     712116
> -/+ buffers/cache:     977852    1076756
> Swap:       491512          0     491512
> mrburns:~% ps -o user,pid,pmem,vsz,rss,command -p 8569,4956
> USER       PID %MEM    VSZ   RSS COMMAND
> root      8569  8.8 225972 181908 /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -audit 0 -auth /var/gdm/:0.Xa
> tet       4956 23.2 709936 478116 /usr/lib64/firefox-1.5.0.10/firefox-bin
> 
> Incidentally, xrestop implies that firefox is using massive amounts of
> pixmap memory -- around 435MB on my system. If you know of some
> cunning way to reduce that (or firefox's obscene memory requirements
> in general), I'm all ears...

When I was running Firefox 1.5 on my work machine, I was also monitoring 
memory use. It was very noticeable that the memory pressure on the (2Gb) 
machine gradually grew until it hit swap. Killing and restarting all 
firefoxes helped.

Upgrading to Firefox 2 made a huge difference for me. FF 2.0 still leaks 
memory, but it does so an order of magnitude slower than FF 1.5 did, and 
is more stable as well. The peak memory use of Firefox 2 also seems to 
be more constrained than 1.5 was. You should really upgrade - it's worth 
it. Just be wary of extensions that don't play nice (WeatherFox, for one).

Mike

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