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

[Robert Bradbury]

Under Linux, the Firefox I've been running for a day or so is running 9
threads according to the System Monitor.  So at least for some things it
*is* multi-threaded.  Whether page display is multi-threaded or not I don't
know because often times if you don't have all of the HTML or JS specifying
the size/location of various elements you have to wait until they all become
available and/or have finished before you can properly render the window
(tab) image and hand it over to the window manager (X in my case).  There
may be many cases where the pages are not written to be displayed
efficiently. Pages which are designed properly (and not as resource hogs),
e.g. the results of a google search or even Amazon.com pages display *very*
quickly.  Faulting Firefox for something which isn't its fault is shooting
the messenger.

With regard to memory management the problem is being caught between a rock
and a hard place with efficiency vs. portability.  You want to have very
different memory management strategies for history records, bookmarks,
scripts, HTML text, images, sound &| video, etc.  You will not get that if
they all go into a single heap managed by the ANSI C portable functions
(malloc() and free()).  I believe there is some tuning you could do with
GNU's libc implementation of these (under Linux) but that isn't going to buy
you squat on Windows.  You could also rewrite the Linux VM manager to better
handle cases of heap thrashing (but again that doesn't do squat for
Windows).  You have to bear in mind that it probably took a decade until
Linux became robust enough that it could scale from the largest machines
(supercomputers) to the smallest (routers & hand-held devices) and
everything in between and adapt relatively well to most of that hardware.

Robert

On 5/2/06, Alfio Puglisi <alfio.puglisi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/2/06, Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Gross!   Is there a move afoot to add multi-threading and efficient
> > related object/memory management?
>
> Not that I know, but I'm not partecipating in the firefox developing
> community. Someone more knowledgeable is required for the correct
> answers :-)
>
> Alfio
>
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