Nick, do we run any kind of automated leak checking through valgrind? I
found bug 976363 today, it's something that any automated leak detection
tool should be able to catch.
Thanks!
Ehsan
On 2/21/2014, 4:38 PM, Nicholas Nethercote wrote:
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
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