Greetings, We now live in a memory-constrained world. By "we", I mean anyone working on Mozilla platform code. When desktop Firefox was our only product, this wasn't especially true -- bad leaks and the like were a problem, sure, but ordinary usage wasn't much of an issue. But now with Firefox on Android and particularly Firefox OS, it is most definitely true.
In particular, work is currently underway to get Firefox OS working on devices that only have 128 MiB of RAM. The codename for these devices is Tarako (https://wiki.mozilla.org/FirefoxOS/Tarako). In case it's not obvious, the memory situation on these devices is *tight*. Optimizations that wouldn't have been worthwhile in the desktop-only days are now worthwhile. For example, an optimization that saves 100 KiB of memory per process is pretty worthwhile for Firefox OS. On a phone, memory consumption can be the difference between something working and something not working in a much more clear-cut way than is typical on desktop. Conversely, landing new features that use extra memory need to be considered carefully. If you're planning a new feature and it will "only" use a few MiB on Firefox OS, think again. We probably cannot afford it. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975367 is the bug that motivated me to write this email, but I'm also reminded of Firefox 4, which was a release with very high memory consumption partly because several groups independently made decisions that using extra memory was ok for a particular sub-system and the combined effect was bad. We live in a memory-constrained world. Nick _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
