530996 - memory management/utilization

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect, P2)

Description

[guru]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 GTB5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 GTB5

Hi, I observed something related to usage of Firefox memory on windows, explained detailed scenario below

1. Open firefox, browse something which you like
2. Open Taskmanager [Ctrl+shift+Esc]
3. Check the memory that was used by firefox app under Task Manager=>Processes tab
4. Try to minimize the Firefox app, observe the memory utilization in the task manager against firefox.exe.
5. observed that nothing was changed, it was same as it is when it maximized state.. 

Try to see the same behavior  with other browsers (iexplore and Chrome), you can see lot of memory optimization when the app in minimized state.. 

and I have observed the this behavour with other non microsoft applications [ex: open office], they are doing good when those apps got minimized.. I don't why we missed this?

Note: if I browsed only one URL in my FF, it's fine. I never bother about memory usage. but generally my FF always 20-30 urls opened any movement, so it eats 300-500 MB of my RAM every movement. I feel it's a bit heavy. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open firefox, browse something which you like
2. Open Taskmanager [Ctrl+shift+Esc]
3. Check the memory that was used by firefox app under Task Manager=>Processes tab
4. Try to minimize the Firefox app, observe the memory utilization in the task manager against firefox.exe.
5. observed that nothing was changed, it was same as it is when it maximized state.. 
Actual Results:  
usage memory retained same in TaskManager 

Expected Results:  
it should reduce the memory usage when compared to maximize time like how other browsers (IE,Chrome) working.

mentioned in the details section itself.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Config.trim_on_minimize

This is preffed off as it can adversely effect performance on computers with slow hard drives. As this does nothing to reduce memory usage it just caches it in the pagefile. See bug 76831 for the full details as to the reasoning behind this.