Memory Breakdown in Firefox
A couple of years ago I was chatting to Firefox developers on IRC about the need for a memory map in the browser. I won't claim any credit at all for it happening. (In fact I don't know when it did get implemented.)
If you want to figure out where the memory's going use about:memory. Here's a nice post showing where it proved invaluable to the developers: You make what you measure by Nicholas Nethercote. (And I think the comments to the post are interesting also.) In the post Nicholas describes how he was able to use the memory map to design an enhancement that avoided memory wastage. In browsers memory wastage is a big issue, along with script execution speed. In z/OS, we also keep a keen eye on memory usage and execution speed. Fortunately for us we have SMF to help us. Unfortunately for Firefox there is no such timestamped instrumentation to help plot the trend and discern behaviour. But still it's good to see this function. And to know it's being used well. |