Re: browser

["Sourav K. Mandal" <smandal dichotomy dyn dhs org>]

> 
> Here's a snapshot from `top` that I just took.  This is typical of netscape,
> and it keeps getting worse the longer it lives.
> 
> 16174 matthew    2   0 26920  26M  8516 S       0  0.0 21.0   2:54 netscape-c
>  om
> 
> That's 21% of my 128M, with a VM size of 26M.  Add that to my applet and pane
>  l 
> fetishes and you're talking about some real memory.  Pretty soon I'll have to
> restart netscape or it will get out of control.  

I had the bug of growing memory consumption as well, but it 
disappeared when I upgraded from 4.71 to 4.72; it has not reappeared 
with 4.73.  The reason I believe was that the statically linked 
Motif routines included in the executable could not properly dispose 
of all the pixmap data it had loaded; I hacked around that by 
installed LessTif and using the dynamic executable included in the 
4.71 distribution.

> Mozilla is worse.  Maybe it'
>  s
> the debugging code, but I doubt it.  Netscape has behaved like this since I
> started using Linux, 3 or 4 years ago.  Granted, I haven't tried the latest
> Milestone because I didn't see any resource improvements between the previous
> two.  Is it better?  

I downloaded the beta release Netscape 6.0pre1 (M15 w/ crap thrown 
in) from the official Netscape web portal.  It crashes, but 
gracefully, and the memory consumption has been tolerable and 
stable.  "mozilla-bin" will consume about 20% of my 128MB RAM, but 
there were only nominal increases when opening multiple windows, 
which is a vast improvement on the 4.x series.  I do not know enough 
about the new Mozilla architecture to comment on why that is, and if 
that's a good thing.

Regards,

Sourav Mandal


------------------------------------------------------------
Sourav K. Mandal

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Physics
http://web.mit.edu/smandal/www/

"In enforcing a truth we need severity rather than
efflorescence of language. We must be simple, 
precise, terse."

                      -- Edgar Allan Poe, 
                        "The Poetic Principle"