[extropy-chat] Optimal computer configurations [Was: Commentary: Does Karl Schroeder's opinion reallymatter?]

[Samantha Atkins]

On May 1, 2006, at 11:49 AM, Alfio Puglisi wrote:

> On 5/1/06, Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
>>
>> Ah.  Does Firefox have its on memory management internally or does it
>> just depend on raw request to the platform alloc routines that it
>> then chains together.  From the description i would guess the
>> latter.
>
> The latter, and AFAIK it doesn't free the memory used by the images in
> a tab when you close it, so the memory usage grows and grows. It's
> also single-threaded, and a processor-intensive tab can effectively
> hang the others for quite a while.

Gross!   Is there a move afoot to add multi-threading and efficient  
related object/memory management?  Or would this be too much a re- 
write?   The latter seems like it should be reasonably isolated.   
Adding threading when it is missing is usually a more global task.

- samantha