Author Topic: Firemin: reduce FF memory usage (Read 12509 times)

urlwolf · « **on:** June 27, 2016, 12:28 AM »

Hi guys,

https://rizonesoft.com/download/firemin/

Have a look at Firemin. It claims to reduce FF memory usage. From reading here, I know all these memory optimizers don't really work, but in this case it definitely stops a small machine I have from swapping to an HDD, so it definitely saves the bacon.

Thoughts?

MilesAhead · « **Reply #1 on:** June 29, 2016, 09:13 AM »

I took a quick look through the source code. The main program is written in AutoIt3 and it does in fact periodically call EmptyWorkingSet() API. If you have the same set of tabs open all the time you could accomplish the same thing restarting FF manually when no operations are pending. It would just come up to the same set of open tabs.

I can see it if the FF browser is going to be open on a server for months and the guy with the server wants to totally automate accounting for the memory leaks. Some of those guys don't reboot a server for months or even years. Which I guess is why the fellow wrote it in the first place.

Myself I tend to close browsers when done with them. The only time I have 8+ tabs open is once a day when I check the giveaway sites. The rest of the time I rarely run more than 4 tabs.

Tuxman · « **Reply #2 on:** June 29, 2016, 09:25 AM »

I have ~ 15 tabs open all day which I irregularly check, plus my daily "these 20 sites without a good RSS feed and/or without an easy way to make one (cough, cough) might have new, interesting contents" routine. Am I really a rare species?

MilesAhead · « **Reply #3 on:** June 29, 2016, 09:40 AM »

I have ~ 15 tabs open all day which I irregularly check, plus my daily "these 20 sites without a good RSS feed and/or without an easy way to make one (cough, cough) might have new, interesting contents" routine. Am I really a rare species?
-Tuxman (June 29, 2016, 09:25 AM)

The difference in my case may be that some people use the browser to actually do work. For the most part I surf and do a few regular forums. I do not keep up on the cutting edge to put it mildly.

tomos · « **Reply #4 on:** June 29, 2016, 09:58 AM »

Am I really a rare species?
-Tuxman (June 29, 2016, 09:25 AM)

Not at all :-)
I probably have an average of 30 tabs open. My version of RSS is Session-Manager: when the saved session becomes too big, I start fresh with an empty window... (I do save the odd session with a name, or bookmark/save-to-PIM the odd page.)
Works fine mostly.

Tuxman · « **Reply #5 on:** June 29, 2016, 10:03 AM »

One of us got RSS wrong.

Curt · « **Reply #6 on:** June 29, 2016, 10:10 AM »

http://www.whatisrss.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

Stuttgart Performance & RSS:

my post #6996

tomos · « **Reply #7 on:** June 29, 2016, 10:14 AM »

One of us got RSS wrong.
-Tuxman (June 29, 2016, 10:03 AM)

yup

f0dder · « **Reply #8 on:** June 29, 2016, 02:10 PM »

I took a quick look through the source code. The main program is written in AutoIt3 and it does in fact periodically call EmptyWorkingSet() API.
-MilesAhead (June 29, 2016, 09:13 AM)

Ah, so my initial hunch was correct: "just another piece of junk using EmptyWorkingSet()".

With quotes like "attempt to eliminate Firefox memory leaks and decrease the amount of memory Firefox uses.", "all the memory leaks was gone." and "The method Firemin uses to decrease Firefox memory usage is not proven and the debate over if it works or not will go on until the end of time, but the logic remains; if it works for you, use it and if it does not, don't use it. It is really that simple." makes me roll my eyes.

And "Firemin runs the clean memory API call a few times per second."? That's just insane.

Manually calling EmptyWorkingSet does nothing Windows won't do itself, it'll only do it prematurely. It doesn't fix anything, it only (potentially) swaps stuff out to your pagefile - before it's necessary to do so. Which means you'll get a disk hit, and another disk hit when that stuff needs to be paged back in.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #9 on:** June 29, 2016, 03:54 PM »

And "Firemin runs the clean memory API call a few times per second."? That's just insane.
-f0dder (June 29, 2016, 02:10 PM)

It does seem overly zealous to say the least. I think I have one tray utility where after each function it sets a timer to call EmptyWorkingSet() once. And that is because the utility accumulates no data and spends most of its time idling in the tray. There is really no need but I was curious about the results. From what I can see in Task Manager it uses less than a MB instead of something on the order of 2 MB and change if left to the OS to monitor the memory.

To keep the FF memory leaks under control it would likely be more efficacious to set a reminder to restart it every couple of days when it is not busy performing some operation. I wonder if this thing is a put on? Perhaps version 2.0 will call EmptyWorkingSet() every 50 ms?

tomos · « **Reply #10 on:** June 30, 2016, 07:34 AM »

It doesn't fix anything, it only (potentially) swaps stuff out to your pagefile - before it's necessary to do so. Which means you'll get a disk hit, and another disk hit when that stuff needs to be paged back in.
-f0dder (June 29, 2016, 02:10 PM)

that's for that info

I would have considered it otherwise, although the main culprit is still flash video, plugin container, when streaming video

Steven Avery · « **Reply #11 on:** July 01, 2016, 02:48 PM »

I use the Restart button that is given by a add-on (currently "Restart My Fox") .. but sometimes I am too late and Firefox has hogged up. (I keep a PsKill Firefox button on the taskbar). An auto-restart every hour would be nice, allowing that there has been a one-minute lull, I have not seen a restart tool that works automatically. Doing this by seconds is dumber than Clinton and Trump combined.

Similarly, there are issues with the Session Manager extension, to save the previous work, lately it has been giving blank "New Tabs" too frequently, so I am going back to the TabMixPlus or Firefox session manager method. Afaik, none of these are great, but they do help. I'll try Session Manager again in a month or so, it has been pretty good over time.

My related problem is that Firefox tends to go in "(Not Responding)" mode too easily (the hogging up mentioned above.) No other program does it, and it can happen with only 10 or so tabs open.

Firefox still remains my browser of choice, the multi-row and flexibility of Tab Mix Plus & Lazarus are the two main reasons, plus I use the toolbox bar as a type of pim and handy-dandy place that works well for some stuff.

Lazarus may be on Chrome. Plus, I still like Firefox in general more than any alternative, although Pale Moon and Vivaldi get some use, along with Chrome and others. Chrome is used to create shortcuts pinned to the taskbar (Evernote, Google Docs, Radionony for bluegrass gospel, etc. and those come up in a Chrome box, which is fine. Also it is a bit stronger for Google - Docs, Inbox - types of stuff.

Linkman has a little lull in searching on my moderately fast Dell, due to the 100K+ bookmarks, while it seems to do fine on a stronger Dell. Thus, I plan to test Cacheman, also by Outertech, to see if one OT product helps another. (Already have a license, maybe.) The best solution is probably an SSD.

Steven

MilesAhead · « **Reply #12 on:** July 02, 2016, 02:52 PM »

^^ not responding drives me nuts. Not only that dialog. But at times it just will not scroll an already loaded page. The other thing I do not understand is why it keeps a cache. If I use the back or forward button it fetches the data from the net even if it is only 10 seconds old.

I do have Lazarus on SlimJet(a flavor of chrome.) It sucks except for the alternative of typing for 5 minutes and ending up with vanishing text.

I am using SlimJet with the cache on a Ramdisk. I only sacrificed 256 MB ram for the disk and set the cache to 200 MB. Cache doesn't supercharge like it used to so no sense investing half a GB. SlimJet can scroll in weird ways also. But it doesn't get the long lags like FF. But for some things I already have FF set up and working well. So it is impossible to totally ignore it.

The thing I cannot figure out is why FF seems to react much snappier after a version update. After the new version gets "stale" it is back to the same old same old hangs and lags. The irony is these browsers insist on hogging ram and maxing out the CPU and they don't perform as well as Netscape 6.x. Multicore CPU and GBs of ram and it still can't scroll a page without an RSVP.

Steven Avery · « **Reply #13 on:** July 04, 2016, 05:04 AM »

And I was thinking of reinstalling Firefox, per one recommendation.

Instead, I went back to NoScript. I've had a mixed feeling about NoScript (Girogio got into some battles with AdBlock Plus a while back, plus taming NoScript itself to act properly takes some effort, plus I have no conceptual problem with seeing a bunch of script ads, plus one time he had a Ask Toolbar opt-out thing, some of this was over 5 years back.)

However, since the major problem is unresponsive scripts (which leads to finger pointing everywhere when you look up the scripts) it seems that he might have the best answer. So far an hour or two of use and the improvement is marked. The missing link. Of course, many pages are allowed manually to do their script thing (e.g. the page may not render right or be largely blanks) so far that page override has not caused any problems. (He allows override of all top-level pages, what I am looking for is all pages of specific domains, although that might be the result of "Allow all this page".)

Slimjet now loaded.

f0dder · « **Reply #14 on:** July 04, 2016, 03:21 PM »

Steven, swap ABP with uBlock Origin (more efficient engine) add uMatrix to the mix - it lets you (easily) select which 3rd-party domains you want to let a site load stuff from (can be controlled on css, image, script, XHR, ... level) and your browser will be zoooooooooming

Steven Avery · « **Reply #15 on:** July 04, 2016, 11:34 PM »

Ok, I got uBlock and uMatrix loaded. Do you like to add some of the auxiliary uBlock lists? I'll start with the default on 3rd party filters.

NoScript, for now, I put on its lesser mode (it allows scripts but looks for clickjacking and stuff. Your recommendation there?

I actually did not have ABP loaded. The reason was that I was thinking more of ads at the time (which I don't mind) rather than resources.

f0dder · « **Reply #16 on:** July 05, 2016, 03:04 PM »

Here's a snapshot of my uBlock filter lists:

Firemin: reduce FF memory usage

You'll notice I don't have, for instance, "Anti-social" lists - that's because I disallow allow connections to those domains in uMatrix.

I run NoScript in whitelisting mode. Sure, it's a bit of a bother, but for domains I visit on a regular basis, the NoScript + uMatrix only has to be done once (or when sites change their infrastructure). YMMV

Ads annoy - I can live with "quiet" ones, but there's too much stuff that's huge, pop-over, blinking or whatever. And on top of that, ads are a major malware risk, because they depend on 3rd-party ad networks. Those have been hacked every now and then, causing legitimate sites inadvertently serving malware.

Oh, and I also use RefControl and only send the HTTP Referer header for those sites that absolutely need it.

Steven Avery · « **Reply #17 on:** August 02, 2016, 07:43 AM »

Some thoughts.
The biggest problem is when these things become too obstrusive and unwieldly.

UMatrix is very impressive in how they inform you and let you change things, e.g. keeping Google-Analytics red while greening the site in general.
UOrigin I have to research, it tells me .. something (I use the Firefox buttons on the toolbar.)

NoScript may not be so necessary with those two, I turned off NoScript and rarely get the popup where a script needs a reply. Plus I do not find NoScript easy to work with, even after you say take everything from a site, you may have to do more. It should know how to run downhill. And it is uneven as to whether it has the "Allow" all for a url option.

My biggest problem is Youtube, although I think it is just a matter of getting used to how to turn UMatrix green. I tried to check online if there is a global whitelist for UMatrix for Youtube.

Steven Avery

MilesAhead · « **Reply #18 on:** August 02, 2016, 09:19 AM »

I don't have much patience anymore with AddOns that aren't zero configuration. I installed the chrome version of uMatrix in SlimJet. The first thing I noticed, just letting it run with default settings, is that I could not delete or even read any emails in outlook. The check boxes would check but the line item emails would not select. Right clicking and using Open In New Tab got me another tab with the same page I was on. Still cannot select an email.

After removal Outlook reverted to its usual annoying behavior.

Curt · « **Reply #19 on:** August 02, 2016, 10:13 AM »

"O blind guides, straining out a gnat while swallowing a camel!"

I notice browsers are very slow loading lately. (...) rather than waiting 45 seconds for Firefox to let me type into the field.
-MilesAhead (July 21, 2016, 03:04 PM)

the main culprit is still flash video, plugin container, when streaming video
-tomos (June 30, 2016, 07:34 AM)

- yes, miles, and yes, tomos!

Firefox's unbelievable loading time and the video plugin container are by far the two worst of them all.

f0dder · « **Reply #20 on:** August 02, 2016, 02:10 PM »

I don't have much patience anymore with AddOns that aren't zero configuration.
-MilesAhead (August 02, 2016, 09:19 AM)

Great power and flexibility requires a bit of effort - I'm impressed how easy uMatrix is to use, considering what it does.