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Performance/MemShrink

830 bytes added, 23:40, 15 February 2011
Better Metrics
* Do we only measure peak usage? Or do we want to open and close lots of tabs to try to catch leaks?
* jseward's [http://blog.mozilla.com/jseward/2011/01/27/profiling-the-browsers-virtual-memory-behaviour/ VM-sim extension to Cachegrind] takes a different tack; it measures page faults on a quasi-idealized machine. It's slow, though.
 
=== An alternative approach ===
Good metrics are more difficult for memory usage than they are for cpu time. Mostly this is bad, but we may be able to use it to our advantage because it means it's harder for people to show that Firefox is using more memory than another browser. i.e. you can't load up the equivalent to sunspider in both browsers and immediately see which is better. This means that impact of bad memory usage is based on experience during regular browsing.
 
I wonder if we could add something to Firefox input like "Report Firefox using too much memory" we could then upload the contents of about:memory. This can help us get a better picture of when our users have the perception that we're using too much memory. It also gives us a better opportunity to discover memory leaks that are happening in the field.
== A Clear Goal ==
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