lca2007: Christopher Blizzard [LWN.net]

lca2007: Christopher Blizzard

Posted Jan 18, 2007 4:33 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

After many years watching projects come and go.. I can only say that Blizzards's comments are spot on and need to be repeated when any project is started that wants to change the world.

Agreed, but...there's a certain dissonance between what he says and what he (er, the project) actually does. Items that come to mind include Firefox's insatiable memory appetite, the removal of MNG support even as a compile-time option ("driving from the front" by waiting on standards groups?), the burial of any number of useful and not-that-advanced options in the hideous about:config page, the abysmal performance of the bookmark manager... And those are just the ones I can remember because they interest me; I've seen lots of other examples reported by other folks.

I understand that some of it has to do with resources--certainly their Bugzilla is a huge target, given the size of their userbase. But that goes only so far; some of the decisions are inexplicable and, yes, even user-hostile (e.g., moving one of the image-related options, perhaps loop-once or load-only-from-same-site, to about:config, if I recall correctly).

Greg

Load-only-from-same-site considered useful

Posted Jan 22, 2007 17:47 UTC (Mon) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

I was shocked when I saw it had disappeared from the options panel. It's about as basic a privacy element as exists. (Think web bug.) I've looked in about:config, and I don't see anything to correct the situation, at least that I can identify.

Ah, well...

Re: Firefox

Posted Jan 24, 2007 0:50 UTC (Wed) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]

...Firefox's insatiable memory appetite...

I'm not sure I see that. I've had Firefox 2.0.0.1 running continuously now for about 4 weeks on my 64-bit Gentoo system, I currently have 6 windows and 11 tabs open, and it's using about 360MiB of RAM. Is that bad?

Re: Firefox

Posted Jan 26, 2007 4:01 UTC (Fri) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

I've had Firefox 2.0.0.1 running continuously now for about 4 weeks on my 64-bit Gentoo system, I currently have 6 windows and 11 tabs open, and it's using about 360MiB of RAM. Is that bad?

Oh my, yes (IMHO)... Mine's been running close to 9 weeks, has 4 regular windows open (closed two or three earlier today) plus the bookmark manager, has a total of 9 tabs, and it's using 100MB (RSS). I consider even that rather hefty, though I've definitely seen worse. (A Netscape 4.x instance hit 950MB once... That was after running for 4-6 months, but still--it wasn't a pretty sight, particularly when it locked up. NN4 never liked big tables...)

Btw, I have a parallel instance of Moz 1.7.10 running: same uptime, 3 windows + bookmark mangler, 8 tabs, 65MB (RSS). That's much more reasonable, but then again, I don't work it quite as hard, either.

Greg

Re: Firefox

Posted Jan 26, 2007 7:15 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

That's impossible! On my 64 bit system running 2.0.0.1 it only takes me about 1/2 day of browsing to hit 900 MB. If I forget to kill & restart Firefox every few hours (thank goodness for session saving), my machine goes into deep swap and I have to either wait 20 minutes for the OOM killer to save me or punch the reset button.

And, once it cruises past 600 MB, Firefox gets unbelievably slow. Click on a tab, wait for 1 second of 100% CPU before it responds, stuff like that. I don't know what's different between your 2.0.0.1 and mine, ldo, but I envy you.

I wonder if it has to do with the types of sites one visits.

Re: Firefox

Posted Jan 26, 2007 9:51 UTC (Fri) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]

That's impossible! On my 64 bit system running 2.0.0.1 it only takes me about 1/2 day of browsing to hit 900 MB.

Do you have nspluginwrapper installed to enable the Adobe Flash plug-in? When I did, my Firefox would only run for a couple of days at a time before I started incurring major disk thrashing and slowness. Since I removed nspluginwrapper, Firefox has stayed up non-stop. At least 4 weeks, like I said.

Darn--there doesn't seem to be any easy way to get the exact date and time my Firefox process started--all ps is showing is "2006" ...

Re: Firefox

Posted Jan 26, 2007 17:03 UTC (Fri) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

Darn--there doesn't seem to be any easy way to get the exact date and time my Firefox process started--all ps is showing is "2006" ...

Heh...I had the same problem initially, but I found you can use either -o bsdstart or -o start=WIDE-START-COLUMN to get the day and month, at least.

Greg

P.S. No Flash, no Java here.