392297 - "Free memory regularly" option request

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[patrickdrd]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a8pre) Gecko/2007081409 Minefield/3.0 MEGAUPLOAD 1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a8pre) Gecko/2007081409 Minefield/3.0

I was using maxthon (previously called myie2) browser before switching on to fx,
and in maxthon there was an option "Free memory regularly":

[IMG]http://i13.tinypic.com/4znxzjn.jpg[/IMG]

a feature that (I guess) many people would love to see on their beloved browser (fx)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

You're not claiming that we don't free memory, are you ? Ofcourse we do !

As long as a memory block is in use (like, in the bfcache, or on screen), we can't free it. But we're using refcounted memory, and a gc-system that can deal with circular dependencies. The moment it's not in use, it will be freed.

Comment 2

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to comment #0)
> User-Agent: (snip) Windows NT 5.1; (snip)
> (snip) Minefield/3.0

Does your "memory" mean digits in "Memory Usage" column for firefox.exe in Process Tab of Task Manager of MS Windows NT or later, which looks to be real memory size Firefox really requires and real memory size Firefox is really using? Or digits in "Virtual Memory Size" column?

If you are mainly talking about digits in "Memory Usage" column of MS Win's Task Manager, read thru meta Bug 320915 and read thru bugs & documents pointed in it first, and read Bug 381950 and bugs/documents pointed it second, please.
Ant try config.trim_on_minimize=true third.
You can probably see similar result to next which is desribed at http://forum.maxthon.com/index.php?showtopic=66181
> Mem Usage:  5,120
> VM Size  : 28,984 
although VM Size when Firefox is usually sufficiently larger than maxthon. 

And fourth, compare situation when new profile and situation when current profile, if you are using extension(add-on). 
And try other settings such as "smaller max memory cache size" or "inhibiting of fast back&forward" and so on, fifth.

For digits in "Virtsual Memory Size" column, there are many issues currently:
 (a) Firefox/Thunderbird/Seamonkey are one of the biggest memory eaters;
     - inefficient virtual memory usage
     - delay of freemain because garbage collection is used 
 (b) Some situations, never issue freemain once getmain'ed, although re-used
 (c) True memory/resource leak
If you are talking about "Virtsual Memory Size", at least isolate (a)/(b)/(c), please.

Comment 3

[Peter Weilbacher]

There is an extension that now frees memory on request, that works with Firefox 3: RAMBack (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5972).

The cycle collector added in Gecko 1.9 also reclaims memory regularly, decoded images are discarded from RAM regularly,too. Both of these are very similar to what the Maxthon checkbox talks about. Now that the new allocator is used (starting with Firefox 3 beta 4 or beta 5) and memory fragmentation is greatly reduced it should also be apparent when it runs. If Maxthon does something else it is not clear from this bug report what that is, so I'm resolving as incomplete. If you have more (detailed technical) information, this could be reopened.

Comment 4

[patrickdrd]

thank you very very much,
I totally agree ;-)