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Generational GC has landed in Firefox

206 points| dbaupp | 12 years ago |blog.mozilla.org

48 comments

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[+] parley|12 years ago|reply
Great work! Personally, I really hope Project Electrolysis will be successful, for both security and performance reasons. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
[+] cpeterso|12 years ago|reply
You can test Electrolysis (e10s) in Firefox's Nightly channel. Use the File > New e10s Window command. Firefox can run e10s and non-e10s windows at the same time, so I use an e10s window by default and when I run into an e10s problem, I open a non-e10s window as a workaround. If you are using Linux or Windows, you may need to set the "layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled" about:config pref, but the "New e10s Window" command will open a dialog box to tell you if your computer needs this pref.
[+] AndrewDucker|12 years ago|reply
Another great step along the way towards a compacting GC.

I wonder how much more memory can actually be saved in Firefox.

[+] ksec|12 years ago|reply
Does it matter? At first we wanted GGC, or CGGC because we want Firefox to be Snappy. We wanted Project Async because we want it to be Snappy.

But after all the bugfixes and everything Firefox is still no snappy. And they landed that Hideous Australis UI.

[+] AshleysBrain|12 years ago|reply
Great! This should be useful for games to help reduce GC-invoked pauses.
[+] CmonDev|12 years ago|reply
Performance-conscious games should probably use asm.js. I wonder if GC is relevant for asm.js.
[+] confluence|12 years ago|reply
Performant games never release their memory, so they should never get paused by the GC.
[+] agumonkey|12 years ago|reply
Subjectively Nightly is close to Chrome fast in terms of UI and page first render. Other loads like maps.google.com don't seem to improve. But anyway that seems like an important step.
[+] emn13|12 years ago|reply
Notably that's a prime google web property, and I don't doubt that they made sure that it's snappy on chrome - which says more about google maps than about chrome, in all likelihood.

For comparison, on my machine maps.bing.com is about as fast in FF as in chrome (panning around is about as snappy), whereas IE11 is much faster (it's a little snappier in gmaps too).

In other words: IE on bing does notably better than IE on google; and chrome on google does noticably better than chrom on bing. It's not hugely surprising - all three browsers can be quite snappy if you profile and ensure you miss various slow paths, and of course MS + google make sure their mapping services work well in their own browser.

[+] Ygg2|12 years ago|reply
Great work guys. Hopefully it was or will be worth it. Best of luck :D