Quote:
Originally Posted by Blossom
There was an update earlier to v58 I'd stay at v57 if you can. Quantum runs like crud before I wish I had never let it Update a few months ago.
|
Quantum runs
wonderfully here. You need to understand what's going on.
Mozilla is trying to increase Firefox performance. The easiest way to boost performance is to throw more hardware at it, because hardware is cheap. Most current machines have the resources to support what Quantum is doing. (For that matter, I have a 32 bit version of Quantum installed under Ubuntu Linux, on an old Acer netbook with a 1.6ghz Atom CPU and 1.5GB RAM. It works, and performance is reasonable given what it's running on.)
The big push has been multi-process Firefox. Speed up performance by doing things in parallel, instead of sequentially on the main execution thread. Modern CPUs have multiple cores, and can execute more than one instruction at a time. I have a quad-core CPU, and on each clock tick, each of them can be executing an instruction.
The trick to running stuff in parallel is breaking out what must be done into tasks that
can be run in parallel, so process B is't blocked because it has to wait for process A to complete before it can run. Mozilla is rewriting parts of its Gecko engine in a language it developed called Rust, which makes writing parallel code easier.
The biggest change in Quantum was the introduction of a new rendering process called Stylo. Stylo attempts to do things in parallel. If you look at Firefox in Task Manager manager, you'll see an assortment of processes under the top level. There will be a main process, a compositor process, four content container processes, and an extension process. The content containers are where tab content is stored.
The default setup for Quantum is four content containers, but you can change that. Go to Options/General. Scroll down to
Use recommended performance settings and
uncheck that box. A new line will appear called Content process limit.
reducing that number will save RAM at a cost in performance.
Increasing it may
improve performance at a cost in RAM. Try dropping the Content process limit to 2 and restarting Quantum. See if it helps conserve RAM.
Yes, Firefox Quantum wants more RAM. but using more RAM is the easiest way to improve performance. This is not the first time an architectural in FF has boosted RAM requirements. Firefox deals with content as JavaScript objects. Changing web standards required making the JavaScript object larger to be able to support the changes. RAM requirments went up. Users were unhappy, but there really wasn't any other option.
Quote:
|
I had to disable my extensions because it was using 2GB of ram with only four tabs.
|
Quantum here is using 1.3GB RAM with 22 tabs.
And I have 35 extensions enabled, and a lot more installed but disabled, as I test to see which ones are keepers.
Extensions do
not drive up memory usage here.
Which extensions were you running that you disabled? "Legacy" extensions that ran under earlier versions no longer work. Current extensions must be entirely JavaScript, and written using the Web Extensions API. Nothing
I run has shown a significant increase in memory requirements, and the Extension process is currently taking all of 11.5MB with 35 loaded. In the context of total memory requirements for FF, that's
nothing.
______
Dennis