noel alanguilan

firefox 3.0.10 did not solve facebook-eating-memory issue for me

i woke up with an update waiting for me. it was apparently firefox 3.0.10. the first thing that came to mind was install the update and visit facebook to see if there were any improvements from the last version. ufortunately, as sh0wn by the screenshots, there were none or very little improvements. it still doesn’t release memory properly unless you close firefox altogether.

i used the same test as the last time.

and this is the usresponsive script which has been giving me problems

silyang plastik
(plastic chair)

one afternoon in an old, old house.

i noticed a couple of things that changed when i ugraded to ubuntu 9.04

• the menu entry of grsync was moved from applications – internet to applications – system tools
• opera disappeared. i don’t exactly know how but the .opera subdiretory with my previous settings was still there. i just had to download the latest .deb package directly from the opera website. it wasn’t in the add/remove applications program and there’s one dubious looking entry in synaptic so i decided to do a direct download.
• skype disappeared too (there’s a pattern here). so i had to download the .deb package directly from skype. because of the relative newness of ubuntu 9.04, the available versions are for ubuntu 8.10 but these should work as before.
• after ugrading to firefox 3.0.9 flash videos became choppy. i remember uninstalling the flash plugins–all of them–via synaptic. then downloading and installing the latest .deb from the adobe website. i also noticed that firefox’s memory footprint became quite a bit larger–a little over 500 megabytes in my case–especially after spending a good amount of time in javscript and ajax-heavy sites i.e. facebook.
• the booting, shutdown and login screens are new.
• when shutting down the computer there’s a new confirmation dialog box with a 60-second countdown timer confirming if you really want to shutdown or not. this also applies when you want to restart the computer.
• booting seems faster–around 20 seconds on one workstation.
• there’s a new theme called new wave which i switched to.

i’m just wondering how it performs with older computers (pentium 4, 256 meg ram). if you know, please leave a note.

it was just a hunch that i’ve been meaning to dive into for a couple of days now. when i’m on facebook, the memory footprint of firefox gets larger and larger until i reach that point where i am forced to close firefox (or kill the process). i do have several tabs open at the same time–besides facebook i am also accessing my mail, this blog, slashdot, a news site, a bike forum, flickr and ubuntu forums, just to name a handful. so it was hard to pin down the culprit to just one site.

this morning i decided to experiment. from a fresh boot:

• start firefox
• log on to facebook only (defaults to my profile)
• click on home
• click on a friend’s profile
• click on home
• click on another friend’s profile
• click on home
• click on a third friend’s profile
• click on home

in the memory and swap history section, each step corresponds to each visit to my 'home' page in facebook

i waited for the browser to finish loading each page before moving on and clicking on the next. by the fourth visit to my home page the browser started to get sluggish and it popped a warning (second image) saying that there is an unresponsive script on the page and it is offering either to let the script continue or to stop it. i opted to stop the script and close the browser. the first image shows an increase in memory usage each time the home page in facebook is revisited. by the fourth visit the swap memory has started to increase as well.

i also found out that closing the browser tab where facebook is assigned does not free the memory it used. that can only be accomlished by closing the browser itself.

this may be the script that's allocating all that memory.

i’m not sure which is really the culprit but i’m leaning more on firefox’s memory handling. i do not remember the previous versions being this  bad at handling memory. but then again facebook may be using a new script for the user’s home page.

i’m just hoping it gets fixed. soon.

this is a listing of helpful web sites of the software that are commonly found in a linux installation. most of these programs, with the exception of linux, also have a windows version. i’ll add more help sites as we use more programs.

evolution mail:
documentation, faqs

gimp:
documentation, tutorials, faqs

open office:
documentation, community forum, tutorials, faqs

thunderbird:
knowledgebase, support forum, faqs, help & tutorials,

ubuntu linux:
official ubuntu documentation, unbuntu forums

Kambal
(twins)

these are the door handles of a food place along escolta called polland. i like their hopia.

silyang kawayan
(bamboo chair)

its actually cherry’s relaxing/reading chair. the picture was taken during earth hour 2009

i’m in a bind of sorts. half of my users are using office 2007 and half are using office 2002. what can i say? the crisis came and we put ugrading the rest on indefinite hold. but there are complications with this kind of set up. the problem stems from the inability of the office 2002 users not being able to read the newer file format of office 2007 (docx mostly). typical of microsoft. they want every old-version user to upgrade to the latest and greatest. but everyone is in cost reduction mode so upgrading is not a popular option for now. besides, i was informed that you can’t really upgrade an old oem version, say office 2002 oem, to the next latest and greatest oem version. you have to buy the boxed product for it to be eligible for an upgrade in the future.

so, what to do with the incompatibility situation? download and install openoffice 3.01 alongside office 2002. use openoffice to open the newer docx documents and save into a format compatible with office 2002. circuitous, i know. some of you may be suggesting why not just use openoffice instead?

yeah, why not, indeed?

oracle is buying sun. oracle is into databases in a big way. sun is home to sparc, solaris, java, open office, and recently, mysql. a lot of people have been blogging about what will come out of this marriage. i’m just wondering about what will happen to open office, mysql, in that order.

oracle doesn’t really need mysql. it is, after all, a huge database company. maintaining a free open source sql database such as mysql may just eat away at the markets of its other database products. so mysql may be spun off or, more logically, ultimately die under the care of oracle. i’m not really worried as i know that mysql has been forked already so the line will go on.

what i’m really wondering about is what will oracle do with openoffice? oracle is known to be one of the top contributors to linux because it ultimately contribute’s to the company’s income. but i do not see openoffice contributing significantly to oracle’s bottom line. i reluctantly see openoffice withering under oracle which is a shame, really. should this actually happen i will be sad but not worried as there are other alternatives. as always is the case, with open source. there’s go openoffice which is an alternative build to sun’s openoffice. and then there’s ibm’s lotus symphony.

but i do hope that oracle will continue openoffice development or better yet maybe spin it off. its better than killing it off.

bantay ng mga kandila
(guardian of the candles)

this was taken during earth hour 2009. the figure is called a bul-ul or bulol which is a symbol of an ifugao rice god or a guardian spirit. this particular bulul is holding a child.