This forum is for technical discussions that help to improve the performance of the Mozilla code

Robert Kaiser | 27 May 2011 16:27

Re: 'But firefox is no longer just a browser' (Firefox fat on Javascript?)

Michael Witten schrieb:
> Are such resources being cached in working memory? Maybe most
> resources should be cached explicitly on disk

Well, there's always a memory vs. speed tradeoff here. Of course, we 
could optimize for using as little memory as in any way possible, which 
just would mean a very significant cost in speed, depending on how far 
we go. I tend to think of this in terms of "buying memory is cheap, 
buying time isn't".

Robert Kaiser

--

-- 
Note that any statements of mine - no matter how passionate - are never 
meant to be offensive but very often as food for thought or possible 
arguments that we as a community should think about. And most of the 
time, I even appreciate irony and fun! :)

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Michael Witten | 27 May 2011 20:41

Re: 'But firefox is no longer just a browser' (Firefox fat on Javascript?)

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 14:27, Robert Kaiser <kairo <at> kairo.at> wrote:
> Michael Witten schrieb:
>>
>> Are such resources being cached in working memory? Maybe most
>> resources should be cached explicitly on disk
>
> Well, there's always a memory vs. speed tradeoff here. Of course, we could
> optimize for using as little memory as in any way possible, which just would
> mean a very significant cost in speed, depending on how far we go. I tend to
> think of this in terms of "buying memory is cheap, buying time isn't".

You are indeed correct that it is slower to read data from disk rather
than working memory; I am reminded of this fact everytime Firefox
shoves my other programs' working memory to disk.

So, I say this tradeoff should be exposed to the choice of the
individual user: I would rather have a slower Firefox cache than a
slower overall computing system (and a memory upgrade is not
possible).

Having Firefox read from my local disk is likely much faster and
bandwidth conserving than having it read from a remote server on the
Internet, so the cache is still quite useful even if it has been put
on disk.