167035 - track memory usage and performance via help|about

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: XPCOM, enhancement)

Description

[Marko Macek]

It seems mozilla still has serious memory usage problems (I just restarted after
my mozilla had VM Size of 250M, despite just having 2 browsers + mail open)

It would be very useful for bug reports to have help|about show the status of
various memory allocators (current,max allocated).

another thing would be performance of the javascript GC, mostly average/maximum
latency.

Comment 1

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

cathleen, are you interested?

Comment 2

[benc]

Is this a networking feature?

Comment 3

[Cathleen]

we have lots of footprint analysis/reduction work need be done.  This is a
feature, and we won't be able to get to.

i welcome any volunteers.

Comment 4

[Sylvain Pasche]

I don't this this is networking related. I'm setting it to XPCOM as a better choice.

I would rather see this as a component which could return information (amount of memory allocated, number of XPCOM objects, Memory cache size, ...). Then, this could be added to the UI where appropriate (or maybe just let extensions show that information).

Would the overhead of adding counters to malloc/free and XPCOM allocations be tolerable for this to be enabled in optimized builds?

Comment 5

[Sylvain Pasche]

This is probably a duplicate of bug 392351 (or it could that that API to show memory information in about|help).

Comment 6

[Sylvain Pasche]

hrm, I can't type in this bug. s/could that that/could use that/.

Comment 7

[RNicoletto]

Should we replicate the "about:memory" feature implemented in Google Chrome? (see attached screen shot)

Comment 8

[RNicoletto]

Attachment: Google Chrome 3.x "about:memory" page

Comment 9

[Deepak Kumar Vasudevan]

about:memory is available in FireFox 3.6.3 right? But this bug still indicates NEW status!!!

Comment 10

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

We now have about:memory, and various tracking bugs for improving it further (eg. bug 563700).