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Firefox is a hog on the mac
Overheard
from a Twitter post by
JeromeGotangco
JeromeGotangco
@friarminor firefox is a hog on the Mac. Try doing it in Safari or Opera or Webkit
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Inappropriate?Actually it isn't anymore, Firefox 3 has moved towards making it a much better Mac app. I use the Firefox 3 nightlies (but RC1 would work fine). I used Camino before because Firefox 2 was, yes, bad on the mac. Firefox 3 has solved that, it seems.
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Inappropriate?(copy of previous post)
Firefox 3 works quite well now on Mac (even with 25 extensions loaded): although it's a bit slow to start, it is quite fast to use, and doesn't use more memory than Camino (Safari 3 uses a lot of memory).
Regarding appearance, there a nice skin here: GrApple.
I still prefer Camino, because it is better integrated with the OS, eg: I can select some text and launch a quicksilver search with it. -
Inappropriate?Firefox starts ok, but after 6 hours with 5 tabs open it goes ridiculously slow. The only way to fix this is restarting the app or sometimes the whole system.
I’m frustrated
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I see the same with Safari, though. It starts to do swapping when it hits your RAM ceiling. I have 3 gigs in my macbook (well, 4, but it won't touch the 4th) and it fills up just using Safari. Currently I have 1.5gb free (I'm using Safari for now because of a bug in Firefox trunk builds that isn't fixed), but that's because I just restarted Safari again. This is a problem with how Mac OS handles memory, it doesn't free memory that hasn't been used for hours (or days) until absolutely necessary, which starts swapping and such. I bought an app called iFreeMem to alleviate the problem with both Safari and Firefox and I'm sure other browsers as well. -
I see. So that doesn't happen on Windows?
Is this app you mentioned helping? -
Windows manages memory differently, and Firefox flushes memory when a tab is closed (it's getting better in the 3.5 betas, always progressing), whereas the mac doesn't (through no fault of Firefox). The app I mentioned does help a lot, it basically uses as much memory as possible for a minute, which forces OSX to flush the other RAM, and then closes itself, leaving a ton of RAM free. Open up Activity monitor and look at how big the blue section is. Blue is basically RAM that hasn't been used in forever, but will be written to the hard disk whenever the green gets small enough. If it was written sooner (which iFreeMem makes it do), then it's slow for a brief period while being cleaned up, then fast.
I hate recommending a for pay program, but they do have a free trial to see if it works for you. Apple really should fix this in the OS. -
Inappropriate?You don't have to pay for iFreeMem:
(copy of post on http://osx.iusethis.com/app/ifreemem):
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by guns, 2008-04-24 (score: 13)
c'mon people: /usr/bin/purge
Just type in 'purge' at the command line (Terminal.app)
from the man page:
PURGE BSD System Manager's Manual PURGE
NAME
purge -- force disk cache to be purged (flushed and emptied)
SYNOPSIS
purge
DESCRIPTION
Purge can be used to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk buffer cache for performance analysis.
It does not affect anonymous memory that has been allocated through malloc, vm_allocate, etc.
SEE ALSO
sync(8), malloc(3)
Alternately, run 'du /' in the terminal for 10 seconds and then kill it with 'killall du'
Rapidly seeking the hard disk tends to free up inactive memory.
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