145576 - Release Notes minimum system requirements

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Documentation Graveyard :: Help Viewer, enhancement)

Description

[Bamm Gabriana]

I don't know if this is the place to submit this, but here goes.

Way back 0.9.4 the release notes added a line saying the minimum system
requirement for Windows was a Pentium 233 with 64 MB of memory. That was
true: Mozilla was simply unusable with anything less than that.

Since then so many performance enhancements have been successfully made.
I am running Mozilla on a Pentium 166 with 32 MB RAM and it is now so
light and fast I would say it outperforms IE6 on this computer! It is
definitely usable, which is not what I can say for Netscape 6. I would
say congratulations are in order.

I think it's about time we update the minimum system requirements. I'm
sure it requires a lot less memory than 0.9.4/Netscape6.2, and the new
value should be given in the release notes to to give recognition to the
efforts made by the performance team.

Furthermore, most software give a *minimum* system requirement and a
*recommended* system requirement. Minimum is what is required for the
software to be usable. Recommended is what we need to have fairly good
performance even with other apps open.

I would suggest keeping Pentium 233/64MB as the recommended system
requirements, and lowering the minumum system requirement to a
Pentium 166 with 32 MB of RAM. That should be a fairer assessment of
what Mozilla actually requires now.

Comment 1

[Brant Gurganus]

Perhaps there can be a recommendation with the current requirements and new
lesser requirements with a warning that behavior will possible be slow and clunky.

Assigning to timeless as he does release notes.

Comment 2

[timeless]

Arg. how in the world do you calculate this?

I just ran a mozilla nightly on my windows 98 pentium 133 laptop w/ 32 mb of ram.
I left the application sitting on a remote server, so it took about two and a
half minutes to launch, but after it launched I could browse normal pages (e.g.
slashdot) without any problems. -- The constraint was the network connection.
Scrolling was fine and everything.

I've also used mozilla on a mac os 9 powermac 7100/66 w/ 104 mb of ram. Again
mozilla lived on the same remote (w2k) server and launch time wasn't good but
mozilla was usable.

If we're going to modify release notes for minimum system requirements then I'd
like some formula that we can point to when we make changes to them.

Comment 3

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

We should probably come up with some minimally sufficient performance numbers
for startup, new window and pageload (which can all be measured pretty easily)
and then figure out what minimal system will meet those numbers. Startup is
probably our worst performer relative to the competition so maybe that number is
suffificient. 
To come up with that minimally sufficient performance number, perhaps we should
just take the competition as a baseline and say that Moz should start, for
example, no slower than twice the startup time of IE. Then we could find the
minimal RAM+CPU combo that would achieve that number. 
Or maybe we should not put so much emphasis on startup and say that our minimum
system requirements depend on meeting some acceptable pagelayout and UI
responsiveness criteria. I don't know. 

Comment 4

[Brant Gurganus]

I would personally say that the minimum requirements would involve only UI
responsiveness once loaded.  Recommended requirements would take into account
the startup time as well.

Default cache size on Windows: 50000KB
I forget what the memory cache size is since it is no longer configurable.

Additional consideration is that Win95/98/ME tries to minimize memory swapping
while NT/2000/XP more or less does more memory swapping.

Peak Mem Usage on WinXP SP1 is approximately 35000K out of 512 MB possible.
Current Mem Usage appears to be about the same.

Responsiveness if fine for me.

Comment 5

[Brant Gurganus]

Another possible useful number:
Virtual Memory Size is 23320K

Comment 6

[Bamm Gabriana]

I agree that the minimum requirements should not include startup time. A lot 
of applications (e.g. MS Word, Adobe Photoshop) load very slowly on machines 
that have only their minimum system requirements, but the applications 
themselves are usable once they are loaded.

Comment 7

[Owen Marshall (Not reading bugmail)]

Owen is taking QA for "repeating relnote" bugs. Sorry for the spam; search for
the previous string to find and delete these messages.

Comment 8

[Owen Marshall (Not reading bugmail)]

*bugspam*

Comment 9

[Ian Tommins ('thelem')]

This should presumably be resolved WONTFIX since the minimum windows version for FF3 is Windows 2000 which needs more than a Pentium 233 to run on its own. Or are there still up to date linux distros that will run Firefox 3 on a Pentium 233?

Comment 10

[Bamm Gabriana]

> This should presumably be resolved WONTFIX since the minimum windows version
> for FF3 is Windows 2000 which needs more than a Pentium 233 to run on its own.

Can you cite where you got that or is it just your conjecture? Cause your figures conflict with the documentated requirements:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304297

Comment 11

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

This bug has been buried in the graveyard and has not been updated in over 5 years. It is probably safe to assume that it will never be fixed, so resolving as WONTFIX.

[Mass-change filter: graveyard-wontfix-2014-09-24]