The graphs at Stewart’s article demonstrate the results very well – you end up with Firefox using a lot of memory pages, but for each page only a very small part of it actually holds important information. The gist of the problem (if you don’t care to go read yourself) is that Firefox’s memory gets fragmented due to allocating and deallocating small chunks of memory, smaller then a page size – quite like a harddrive formatted for FAT does – When firefox needs more memory it allocates it in large chunks that can only fit at the end of free memory, thereby taking more memory from the operating system, but it frees the memory in small chunks here and there.
This is of course a gross underestimation of the problem, because it doesn’t matter what the user perceives as high memory usage, but what the operating system perceives as high memory usage and as Stewart Parmenter’s results show – the operating system sees Firefox gobbling lots of memory and doesn’t care that the browser doesn’t use most of it. As the blog post that I read that references this claims – Firefox doesn’t use a lot of memory, it just looks like it. Stuart Parmenter investigated this issue and his results are that this is all about memory fragmentation. I’m not saying this is not the case, but the evidence for memory abuse are staggering. Mozilla developers, on the other hand, claim to keep a really tight ship and to test for and fix memory leaks. This of course slows down other applications. One of the main problems people have with using Firefox is that its such a memory hog – it eats up a lot of memory and I’ve seen instances where after running for a few days it can consume more then 1 Gigabyte of memory and as a result becomes incredibly slow as the operating system has to keep swapping browser parts in and out of virtual memory just to change tabs.
I’ve seen this article in the past, but it came up in my Google reader list for some reason, so I’ll blog about it.
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