Arch Linux

Ronin-Sage

Member

Registered: 2008-10-24

Posts: 153

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Any way to address Gecko engine memory "thieving"?

For a while now, I've wondered why, after running my machine for a bit(either ArchLinux or dually-booted XP), memory usage would jump up to about 100MB above the original by the time I shutdown or restarted. I've done a bit of research, and apparently, there are memory fragmentation with Firefox and other Gecko browsers. I don't think I'm taking noticeable performance hits, and I've read it's the way programs actually report currently available memory that could confuse people.

Is this slow, but gradual "bloating" of memory usage after opening/using/closing Firefox sessions as "scary" as it seems? Is there any way to maybe "flush" what I understand to be the pixmem(pixel memory?) cache and have it acknowledged by the system?

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skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Any way to address Gecko engine memory "thieving"?

... and I've read it's the way programs actually report currently available memory that could confuse people.

Firefox, like a lot of programs, will cache memory. While this is memory used, it's memory that the Linux kernel will bump instantly if it needs it. An easy way to check if you should care is to run the 'free -m' command. For instance, this is what my system looks like right now:

~ > free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3950        916       3034          0        192        491
-/+ buffers/cache:        232       3717
Swap:          258          0        258

At first it looks as if 916M of RAM is gone, but if you look at the "-/+ buffers/cache" line, that's the actual total of RAM needed by processes. So, my system requires 232MB of memory right now, but it's using 916MB.