[Info-vax] Mozilla performance Was: Re: Running Alpha VMS under the ES40 emulator

[Paul Sture]

In article <52585765$0$9082$815e3792 at news.qwest.net>,
 George Cornelius <gcornelius at charter.net> wrote:

> I'm finding that what it takes to almost completely freeze
> up my 512 MB / 32 bit Linux system is to leave Mozilla up
> overnight with multiple tabs open.  It pagefaults for what
> seems to be a full 15 minutes at that point, and may still
> be nearly unusable when it all unfreezes [OK, using an
> external Seagate USB3 drive on a USB2 port for paging -
> spinning at an unspecified RPM - but you get the picture].

I've got 16GB RAM here and I can still get the recent versions of 
Firefox to grind to a halt if I really try.

Having said that, I mostly avoid this by closing Firefox at least once 
every day or two.

Notes:

1. I set Firefox to "Show my windows and tabs from last time" when it
   starts.  This normally saves where I was but in recent versions
   I have found I need to be careful in what order I close windows.

   FF appears to save the tab contents of the last window closed,
   so you can lose the open tabs in other windows. For example, if I
   close my main window with multiple tabs having forgotten another
   window open with only one tab, then I lose the multiple tabs on
   restart.

   I did work out a procedure for restoring the sessionstore.js file
   which contains this information from backups, but as of the latest
   version of Firefox (24) this procedure no longer works (note: you
   cannot rely on the size of this file as an indicator of the point
   you lost your tabs, since it doesn't necessarily get shrunk
   when your tabs disappear).

2. In the Tabs settings, I have "Don't load tabs until selected" ticked.
   Older versions of Firefox would attempt to reload all tabs at
   startup with the obvious delay in being able to get anything done
   (and bandwidth hit too, if that's a concern).

3. With regular restarts it is perfectly possible to get to the stage
   where you have a couple of hundred tabs "open" but only a few accessed
   and still have decent performance.  Click on too many of them in the
   same session at your peril though, as performance _will_ nosedive at
   some point.

-- 
Paul Sture

IBM's Thomas J. Watson predicted a "world market for maybe five computers".
Given the way this whole Cloud thing is going, he might have been extremely
prescient.