Re:New Twitter Has Become Browser Poison
by epi0Bauqu on Monday January 17, 2011 @02:37PM
(#2113134)
I've been keeping twitter open in its own Firefox browser on one screen (of three). It routinely refreshes itself and there is some kind of memory leak whereas after a day it is consuming about half a gig of memory, forcing me to kill and restart.
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Re:New Twitter Has Become Browser Poison
by ComputerGuru on Monday January 17, 2011 @02:53PM
(#2113182)
Firefox has crazy memory leaks. Don't blame it on twitter, regardless how bad their code may be.
A tab should be completely and utterly destroyed when refreshed. It doesn't matter how much memory it used, refreshing it or navigating away from that page should (ignoring optimizations, caching, etc. etc. etc.) be like you were never there.
Just look at the hundreds of complaints here: http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/firefox-3-is-still-a-memory-ho...
I have been using it in Chrome and new Twitter has been unreasonably slow. A friend who works at Twitter has acknowledged that they know about the issue and are working on it.
Re:New Twitter Has Become Browser Poison
by epi0Bauqu on Monday January 17, 2011 @03:40PM
(#2113375)
That may be the case, but I've left other sites open all day and they don't accumulate 500MB of memory.
Firefox has crazy memory leaks.
Proof? This was the case with Firefox 2 but now it just seems like this is part of their reputation and is not necessarily grounded in fact.
Re:New Twitter Has Become Browser Poison
by redthrowaway on Monday January 17, 2011 @04:38PM
(#2113564)
I routinely leave my browser open for days on end and simply cycle through tabs, closing and opening new ones as needed, with usually ~10 open at a given time. I, too, noticed that firefox was eating up about half a gig of ram even when it wasn't doing anything, didn't have any youtube tabs open, etc. It got to the point where I would have to close firefox and restart after a day or two. Chrome fixed that. Now, I just use firefox with the modify headers extension to watch domain-specific video, and have no plans to go back.
Now, maybe I'm to blame here, using the nightly build of chromium, but webkit is a walking memory leak. Just for a comparison, I have the same amount of tabs on firefox and chromium and firefox is using 500mb of ram, while chromium is using 3.5 GIGABYTES. And I'm not even using it much.
But really, the problem is easily reproducible. Just open whatever webkit based browser you want, and keep reloading the same moderately big page. Ram goes up, never to return. That works with a trivial program that embeds webkit via gtk, too.
Or you can just look at the commits on webkit: a couple of leaks fixes every week.
Good thing Chrome kills the entire process hosting a tab when you close it.
Re:New Twitter Has Become Browser Poison
by wahnfrieden on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @01:14AM
(#2114832)
Are you sure it's wired memory that it's eating? Or just inactive "standby" memory which will be reallocated to other processes if needed?
If your free memory isn't close to 0, your OS is wasting RAM or you don't have much anything running.
Same problem here with Safari.
I'll vote for process-per-tab as the single best feature of Chrome.
Re:New Twitter Has Become Browser Poison
by redthrowaway on Monday January 17, 2011 @05:46PM
(#2113776)
Me too. The overhead is slightly higher, but having crashes and memory leaks confined to a single tab is awesome.
Re:New Twitter Has Become Browser Poison
by mkramlich on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @02:33AM
(#2115004)
I left Firefox for Safari because Safari was prettier, faster and used less memory.
Lately, I'm close to leaving Safari for Chrome because it's faster, uses less memory and crashes less (in fact, it's never crashed so far, vs 100's of times total probably with Safari.) Unfortunately, Chrome is a little uglier, and has certain less user conveniences. So it's not an easy jump to make.
Re:New Twitter Has Become Browser Poison
by redthrowaway on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @04:02AM
(#2115169)
You think Chrome is ugly and inconvenient? I think it's the best looking browser out there, and the omnibox is fantastic. The only thing I don't like about Chrome on OSX is some flash players don't play nice with it.
They're not confined to a single tab for me. It seems like child tabs go in the parent process, for example, so I usually get 2-5 tabs crashing at once.
I also get more crashes with Chrome than I used to get with Firefox, but maybe I'm just opening more tabs.
Re:New Twitter Has Become Browser Poison
by redthrowaway on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @10:39PM
(#2118474)
Weird. What OS are you on? On OSX I haven't had a bonafide crash (had a couple tabs hang) in a long time.
Re:New Twitter Has Become Browser Poison
by bryanlarsen on Monday January 17, 2011 @05:50PM
(#2113793)
Really? I have to restart Firefox 3 much more often than I ever restarted Firefox 2. I routinely left Firefox 2 running for a month at a time with 100+ tabs spread across several open windows in different workspaces. Firefox 3 only lasts for about a week in a similar situation. Chrome uses more memory per tab, so 100+ tabs isn't feasible with it. (Maybe it is now, I haven't tried recently)
Re:New Twitter Has Become Browser Poison
by honeycrisp on Monday January 17, 2011 @06:49PM
(#2113934)
Exactly. If these memory leaks were really there, why hasn't anyone gone through the code base and found them? From what I understand, the reason the amount of ram Firefox uses grows over time is because of caching, and if another program needs the ram, Firefox trims it's cache. What's the point of having 4 GBs of ram if you're only going to use 1.5?
Firefox's memory leaks are mostly due to JS. On the other hand, if you read the article, you'll notice that the problem is cross-browser.
Are you using FF4 beta? I've had two pages of newtwitter open in app tabs for months now and never ever have problems with it.
Re:New Twitter Has Become Browser Poison
by epi0Bauqu on Monday January 17, 2011 @07:41PM
(#2114068)
Nope. 3.6.13
Try beta.