Re:Firefox, Heal Thyself
by piyush_soni on Tuesday May 14, 2013 @05:37PM
(#5708431)
Is it that Chrome is able to do it just because it's a separate process per tab? (It shows memory consumption by each page.) I try to go to the about:memory page every once in a while, but first that doesn't show information in a very intuitive way, and second, NONE OF the 'GC', 'CC', or the 'Minimize Memory Usage' buttons seem to reduce Firefox's memory usage. Sometimes pressing these buttons actually increases the RAM usage (as seen from the Task Manager on Windows) - which is beyond my understanding. The only way to reclaim the 2 GB of my system RAM firefox has captured is to restart it.
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The garbage collector and cycle collector are run all the time normally, so clicking on those buttons shouldn't have too much effect on memory when you are using the browser normally. They are mostly useful for getting to a settled memory state right after opening a page rather than having to wait a few minutes for it to naturally happen, or in the rare cases where a GC should be triggered but isn't.
As for why running the GC might increase RAM usage, I guess it is possible that some memory had been paged out, but running the GC causes the browser to touch all memory, paging it back in. That's just a guess though.