16666 - large number of process sections

Status: CLOSED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: Build Config, defect, P3)

Description

[Colin Blake]

When you start Mozilla up, 274 process sections are used. This is a very large
number and causes Mozilla NOT to start up on some configurations. The M10
release notes document this and suggest ways around this problem, but it would
be real nice if we could reduce this number.

I am actively working on reducing this number for M11, but its not going to
come down to a "normal" number (say 20-30). The reason is the number of
shareable images that Mozilla consists of. Its real tough to get below 2 or
3 sections per image, and with the image count at about 60 at startup time,
I can't see us getting below about 150 sections at best.

One way to completely bypass this problem is to install the Mozilla shareable
images. Although this just shifts the resource requirement from process
sections to global sections, this may be more suitable for some installations
(and will improve performance and resource usage on systems where several
people are all running Mozilla simultaneously). I am planning on adding a
procedure to install/deinstall the Mozilla images for M11.

Comment 1

[Colin Blake]

By clustering and collecting, I have managed to get the process section usage
down to 178. This is still high, but at this point there's not really any way
to improve it. At some time in the future, the C++ standard library will
become a shareable image and this might help (it will certainly help to
reduce the size of the shareable images).

For the M11 release, there will be a command file to INSTALL the Mozilla images.
INSTALLing the images is optional since doing so consumes global pages and
global sections, but one of the benefits is that the Process Section problem
disappears.

That's as good as its going to get, so I'm marking this bug as fixed.

Comment 2

[Colin Blake]

M12 is shipping tomorrow, and it has the ability to INSTALL the images and hence
avoid the process section problem completely. There is also documentation in the
release on what params you need to play with in case you don't want to install
the images.

With these solutions in place, I'm closing this report.