962304 - Memory tool should show total process memory consumption

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(DevTools :: Memory, defect)

Description

[Jim Blandy :jimb]

FirefoxOS is now targeting phones with 128MiB of RAM:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/FirefoxOS/Tarako

Developers hoping their apps will run on this phone would really like to have the content process's total memory consumption plotted over time, with a threshold value of their choosing marked on the y axis.

This should be the memory consumption as reported by the OS, not something we compute by counting things, as the former is what FxOS is using to decide which processes to kill. (On FxOS, each app / page runs in its own child process, rather than sharing a single process amongst many pages as on desktop.)

Comment 1

[Jim Blandy :jimb]

Axel, this is something that's come up in discussion today; I don't mean to suggest any particular priority for it --- I just wanted to capture the idea. Where should this go in our product management apparatus?

Comment 2

[Jim Blandy :jimb]

I assume that developers will be using a more capable device, but want to be check their memory consumption against smaller machines' limitations (like our "responsive design" mode, but for memory).

Comment 3

[Axel Kratel]

This might be a duplicate of the memory widget 933006. 933006 didn't make any assumption as to where we get the info. Originally, we wanted an easy way to jump back and forth between a general memory widget and the more detailed view that does some object counting. 

Note also 923275 which blocks 933006. I believe this is done.

Comment 4

[Jim Blandy :jimb]

This "total process size" should be included in the timeline, though. Developers want to know which operation caused their total process size to cross the line.

Comment 5

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

> This should be the memory consumption as reported by the OS

I implemented exactly this in bug 945973.

Comment 6

[Jim Blandy :jimb]

Perhaps we could reuse that nsIMemoryReporter...

Comment 7

[Jordan Santell [:jsantell] [@jsantell]]

The performance tools are using nsIMemoryReporterManager's `sizeOfTab` method from bug 918207 -- is that sufficient for this on both desktop and FxOS?

Comment 8

[Jordan Santell [:jsantell] [@jsantell]]

The performance tools' memory recording handles this -- if it does not, we should create a new bug that satisfies this within the context of our current performance and memory tools