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

[Paul Sture]

In article <l3b4kl$aq3$1 at Iltempo.Update.UU.SE>,
 Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

> Probably because you have nightly stuff run by cron which runs over the 
> disk. That causes a lot of memory to be used for disk caching, pushing 
> all applications out to swap. Which in turn cause a lot of page 
> thrashing when you try to do anything, as programs have to fight the OS 
> to get a few pages back. There is a big tendency for memory to be used 
> as disk cache nowadays...

Good plausible theory but OS X by default only runs the locate database 
rebuild once a week*.  *I* modify that but I expect that I am in the 
minority.

* In previous versions of OSX it was in the "periodic weekly" run and 
running that was a convenient way to update the locate database. For 
Mountain Lion systems (and maybe before that Lion, Snow Leopard, both of 
which I skipped) see the contents of 
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist

Extract:

        <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
        <dict>
                <key>Hour</key>
                <integer>3</integer>
                <key>Minute</key>
                <integer>15</integer>
                <key>Weekday</key>
                <integer>6</integer>
        </dict>

I have modified my main OS X installation to take out the "Weekday 6" 
piece.

In article <l3bmr3$98t$1 at Iltempo.Update.UU.SE>,
 Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

> On 2013-10-12 15:59, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> > Johnny Billquist  <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> >> On 2013-10-12 14:18, Simon Clubley wrote:
> >>> No, the real problem is that Firefox has become a bloated monstrosity. :-)
> >>> Running top or ps -axl while using Firefox can be very revealing.
> >>
> >> That is also a problem, but it's a separate one.
> >>
> >> It is very telling when the problem appears "after leaving the machine
> >> running for the night". That should tell you that something happened
> >> during the night...
> >
> > You mean like some application, like perhaps Firefox or Gnome, with a
> > memory leak problem has somehow grown in size over the night to the point
> > where it has allocated too much memory for the system to run properly?
> >
> > Remember, you can't say "Irix" without saying "Memory Leak."  Err... I
> > mean Firefox...
> 
> While I will not exclude memory leaks from likely problems, that is a 
> problem that should be equally bad daytime, and much worse during active 
> use...

I haven't done this for several years but watching either Netscape or 
Mozilla on VMS with "show process/continuous" would show virtual memory 
climbing even when the application wasn't being asked to do anything 
(e.g. sitting on a static webpage with no Javascript or refresh 
statements).

-- 
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.