Interesting observation Bart. I see a huge difference in the total 
memory mapping too. I looked at the mapping size of the individual files 
'firefox-bin' and 'mozilla-bin' in the pmap output and it's the same big 
difference. I've resorted to trivial way:

ls -lh /usr/local/mozilla/mozilla-bin
-rwxrwxrwx    1 root     root         1.7M Jan 13  2004 
/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla-bin

ls -lh /usr/local/firefox-installer/firefox-bin
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         9.4M Nov  7 13:27 
/usr/local/firefox-installer/firefox-bin

May be that explains the diff in the memory maps of these two files in 
their virtual address space (pmap output). From my understanding. pmap 
shows the memory maps in a process's address space (virtual address 
space) and not the physical memory occupied by that process.  But when I 
use top and sort processes based on their memory usage, firefox-bin 
tops. So...I'm curious to know about firefox being 'lightweight' too...




Bart Garst wrote:

>I've asked this before, I just can't seem to find the thread in the
>archives. 
>
>I had been under the assumption that firefox is a lightweight browser,
>where mozilla is an entire suite of Internet apps (mail, browser, chat,
>etc...).
>
>I want to focus on "lightweight". Does this refer to the resources
>firefox uses? I remember being told firefox has a smaller memory
>footprint than mozilla, however, my findings show the opposite. 
>
>Versions are (deb packages):
>Mozilla - 1.6-5
>Firefox - 1.0-4
>
>Here's what I did:
>Only firefox open, single tab, simple html page displayed from my local
>apache installation.
>`pmap -d pid_for_firefox-bin`
>Final line of output reads:
>mapped: 83516K    writeable/private: 52808K    shared: 768K
>
>Then, with only mozilla open, single tab, same page.
>`pmap -d pid_for_mozilla-bin`
>Final line of output reads:
>mapped: 78656K    writeable/private: 50440K    shared: 768K
>
>Mozilla has less mapped as well as less private memory usage.
>
>So the questions are:
>Is my testing methodology flawed?
>Is my original understanding of firefox incorrect?
>
>I'd appreciate any clarification I can get.
>
>Thx,
>Bart
>
>
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