Re: firefox resource hog

[tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost]

Le Sat, Jan 07, 2023 at 01:17:56PM +0530, Mayuresh a écrit :
> I find that firefox 105 or 107 are almost unusable on a laptop running
> NetBSD 10.0 BETA.
> 
> Following is a top snapshot:
> 
>  1615 guest     85    0  3223M  414M poll/0      0:47 58.46% 54.35% firefox
>  2344 guest     85    0  2556M  130M poll/3      0:01  0.00%  0.00% firefox
>  4005 guest     85    0  2533M  105M poll/3      0:00  0.00%  0.00% firefox
>  1333 guest     85    0  2530M   98M poll/2      0:00  0.00%  0.00% firefox
>  1811 guest     85    0  2483M   65M poll/1      0:00  0.00%  0.00% firefox
>  1792 guest     85    0  2483M   65M poll/3      0:00  0.00%  0.00% firefox
>  2482 guest     85    0  2483M   65M poll/3      0:00  0.00%  0.00% firefox
>  1816 guest     85    0   355M   40M poll/0      0:00  0.00%  0.00% firefox
> 
> The laptop has 4G RAM which may sound less to some. But on Linux I can use
> the same laptop with firefox 107 without any problems.
> 
> [ I have yet another laptop with 2G RAM, on which also firefox works fine
> on Linux. On yet another laptop with 8G RAM, with amdgpu, on NetBSD 10
> BETA, firefox simply crashes sometimes taking down the OS. (PR already
> logged). ]
> 
> Can the difference have something to do with drm not working properly on
> NetBSD. (There is a different thread "i915 observations" on these issues.
> Linux uses SNA acceleration which is somehow not working on NetBSD.)
> 
> On the other hand, wonder why firefox has to start so many processes and
> occupy so much of RAM in the first place.

If I understand correctly, to "improve" responsiveness, Firefox runs a process or a thread
per object to render it; if the node has not multiple cores, this will be
processes. It consumes a lot of PID and one has to increase the max allowed to satisfy
the resource hungry app.

If the max is computed, by default, from the available memory, it can be
too low when the memory is not huge (4Gb is considered huge by old men
like me, but, nowadays, I even expect to see one day the BIOS/UEFI to refuse to start in such a
"contrived" environement).

The difference with Linux may be the configuration by default: allowing
threads even with only two cores; allowing more processes for the same
amount of memory.
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
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