Fixing Firefox's memory leak (January, 2005)

[My2Cents]

Most helpful. Thanks.

[Tarpaulin]

Thanks!

[Keith in Iowa]

>>>>Because computers use base-12 counting.

No, computers use binary.

[Terpfen]

Yeah, but memory allocation is still done in base-12, and that's what this thread's about.

[John0309]

What exactly do you mean?

[Terpfen]

What do you mean by what do I mean? *confused*

[Keith in Iowa]

Everything in computers is base 2 - binary. It's all based on bits & bytes & powers of 2... 8 bits to a byte...

2^8    2^7	2^6	2^5	2^4	2^3	2^2	2^1
256    128	64	32	16	8	4	2

thus - 1MB = 1024 bytes = 2^10 and so on...

[Terpfen]

Odd, I was always under the impression that allocation uses base-12.

Ah well, thanks for the correction.

[Riddick]

Sorry Terpfen, he is right. It's all based on binary. That is why on and off are represented on power keys with zero and one ( 0/1 ).

[ken in texas]

You might be thinking of hexadecimal... which is base 16.

[Solamente]

I'll try it, see if it makes what's good better!

[Publius6961]

Great input. Thank you for sharing.
As pointed out, elsewhere, 1k = 2¹⁰ which is 1024 bytes X 16= 16384; same answer, different route...

[Drango]

There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't.

[Terpfen]

There indeed are. (I know enough to get THAT joke.)

[Doohickey]

Doesn't hurt to give it a try, but I think all this is going to do is force Firefox to swap pages out to the page file. You may notice an increase in hard drive activity.

[Nowhere Man]

Firefox bump for later reference

[ez]

Is there a problem with Firefox using 70 megs when you have 256? I haven't noticed any performance issues.

[Terpfen]

I've been using it for a while and don't hear or notice any additonal activity. YMMV, of course.

[Terpfen]

Generally, it's bad whenever a program chews up more memory than it needs. 70 out of 256 is pretty damn disproportionate, IMO.