[Discuss] memory management

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 02:45:13AM -0400, Peter Olson wrote:
> > On June 25, 2015 at 4:39 PM Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> wrote:
> > If you browse daily, and browsing is causing your problem, then it
> > seems clear to me that you do not. 
>
> Blaming the victim is unproductive.

No, sticking your head in the sand and blaming someone else is
unproductive.

Ever hear of contributory negligence?  The victim has some
responsibility to do what is necessary to prevent from being the
victim, in a great many cases.  This is one of them:  There's no
other recourse for you, so you simply must protect yourself.  If you
ask for help and then ignore the good advice you get, then you tend to
get what you deserve.

> What I know is that for years Firefox has consumed all of the CPU time and
> progressively all of the memory of the machine until I kill it.

And I would ask you the same questions that have already been asked
about maintaining your system, opening too many tabs, visiting
malicious/poorly written sites, having enough memory, etc..
 
> Folklore says that that Firefox has had memory leaks for years, maybe at this
> point dozens of years.

Folklore is just that--it's not to be believed (at least not without
verifiable proof).  Javascript is a programming language, which can
cause memory leaks just as well as any other language.  Did it ever
occur to you that the author of the site you're visiting might be at
fault?

  http://javascript.info/tutorial/memory-leaks

Leaks can also occur because of poorly implemented plugins or browser
extensions that you're using.  Firefox is not to blame for any of
that.  There's plenty of other software involved on which to put the
blame for your browser's memory leaks.  

Any or all of those might explain why you suffer from this and I
don't... I don't use a lot of that junk and I avoid sites that load a
ton of garbage and/or use adblock to block the garbage (which FWIW
made a HUGE difference with the performance of certain sites I do
use).  I also don't have less than 8GB of RAM in any of my systems,
and 16 is more the norm for me now.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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