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

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-10-13 10:01, Paul Sture wrote:
> 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.

The rebuilding of the locate database is just one example of something 
happening, but as you say, that's only done once a week by default.
On normal Unix systems, finding and removing old core files (as one 
example) is something that is done every night. There are various work 
done every night in OSX as well... I have not fully inspected everything 
that is done, but there is a bunch of things there.

> * 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

Right. However, you still have work that is done daily, weekly and 
monthly. It's just that the locate rebuilding have been extracted to its 
own.
See /etc/periodic/* for more...

> 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).

Well, I normally keep my netscape running for weeks, if not months 
without restart, and I'm not getting OOM, so obviously it does not 
indefinitely keep allocating memory the whole time.

But yes, sometimes it can be a bit sluggish. But then again, I also have 
machines with lots of memory, which helps.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol