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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