Good news for all Firefox users (especially those who like to open a lot of tabs):

For a long time there have been a lot of complaints about the memory usage in Firefox and anything else that used the Gecko engine. And looking at the numbers for what Firefox would use for memory, they seemed valid. But on the other side of the story, I know that the Mozilla team has been pretty diligent about fixing memory leak bugs. Allocations are tracked closely across checkins and leaks are fixed when they are discovered. So why the different perceptions for what people were seeing in the field and what the programmers were tracking during a development cycle?

As Mozilla starts down the path to running in the .mobile space we are spending time looking at memory pressure issues more closely. .Stuart and .Vlad. spent time .looking at the behavior of the allocator during some simple tests. and it sounds 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. There’s a lot more information in .Stuart’s post of course, including some good visualizations..

It's taking a shift to a mobile platform for Mozilla to take these issues seriously, but finally they are being addressed.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 21:44 and is filed under PC Doctor's Useful Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.