My firefox suffers from major bloat, especially now that I run gmail (with gmail macros, of course), and google reader. Here‘s a very interesting post that suggests that the problem is not leaks (as conventional wisdom would have it), but our old friend fragmentation. The argument is that firefox does lots and lots of allocation, and ends up with most of the free memory in tiny little chunks which can neither be returned to the OS (because they’re in blocks that are partially used), nor paged out (because the page has some active stuff on it). It will be interesting to see the solutions that work in practice …
John
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