Spinning beach ball whenever I open Camino 2.0

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Thingmaker
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Joined: February 8th, 2008, 7:18 pm
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Re: Spinning beach ball whenever I open Camino 2.0

Post by Thingmaker »

It happens on every startup, every morning. It's long enough to be quite annoying (and seemingly unnecessary considering that Firefox fixed this identical problem). Also, I don't leave my computer on all day, nor is it possible to never quit your browser.
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cflawson
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Re: Spinning beach ball whenever I open Camino 2.0

Post by cflawson »

Thingmaker wrote:I don't leave my computer on all day, nor is it possible to never quit your browser.


Never? No. But I might relaunch my browser once every two weeks. My computer never gets shut down unless it *has* to be; it's usually sleeping.

cl
QonoS
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Re: Spinning beach ball whenever I open Camino 2.0

Post by QonoS »

My computer never gets shut down unless it *has* to be; it's usually sleeping.


Now that brings up an interesting (to me, anyway) issue that I've been mulling for a while. This is a tangent but perhaps not completely OT.

Backstory:
I'm using Camino (1.6 of course) on a revA 20" iMac G5 (1.8 GHz), running 10.3.9. My RAM is maxed out at 2 GB. I use my computer, and Camino in particular, pretty heavily: it's not uncommon for me to have 10+ windows open, with a total of 50-75 tabs or more (I'm not so good at putting things away). I also have probably thousands of bookmarks, which does cause Camino to beachball for several seconds on launch -- at least I think that's the problem (as the beachballing happens before the bookmark bar gets populated). I don't mind that; I just deal with it.

The problem is that over time, leaving all that material open, I start getting pageouts, and eventually swapfiles start spawning (I keep track with MemoryStick) -- up to 6 or 7 swapfiles (6 swapfiles = 2 GB of swap space; 7 swapfiles = 3 GB). I can sometimes go over a week without much paging out -- sometimes two if I'm careful, but also sometimes only a day or two if I'm not. That of course slows the system down, and if glitches (like app crashes) want to happen, that's usually when they do. So I try to reboot when I hit multiple swapfiles; ergo, that's when my machine "has" to be shut down.

When that happens, the two main RAM users are, unsurprisingly, Camino and WindowServer. The number reported as "RSIZE" in top is the same as what's reported as "RPRVT" in Activity Monitor; top's VSIZE is listed as "Virtual Memory" in Activity Monitor. Using Activity Monitor's nomenclature, Camino's RPRVT goes up to around 800 MB, and Virtual Memory hits around 1G or more. Meanwhile Activity Monitor reports RPRVT for WindowServer at around 530 MB; Virtual Memory is in the ballpark of 1 G.

Backstory over with:

    • Quitting and relaunching Camino regularly, even when returning to the same session/open tabs, seems to stave off the pageouts/swapfile spawns, although not forever.

    • Is any or all of this expected behavior?

    • I've heard multiple stories about this issue from various tech types. Some claim that RAM just gets "dirty" (fragmented) as a machine gets used in between reboots, and although I didn't ask, that suggests that little can be done to prevent the problem. I don't know if newer OS X iterations deal better with RAM fragmentation, or if there's even a way for an OS to defrag ram on the fly. Others claim that this Simply Shouldn't Be Happening, and there's a problem either with my Camino install, my OS X install, or with Camino 1.x in general.

    • I did notice today that after a Retrospect backup (I back up my OS partition once weekly and my home directory daily) significant memory appeared "free" -- in MemoryStick both active and inactive memory decreased, and free memory increased. Retrospect does seem to do some RAM cleanup when it finishes a run, and the bigger the job, the more cleanup appears to happen. Does that suggest memory problems in Camino? I simply don't know, but I'm curious.

Thanks.
Thingmaker
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Re: Spinning beach ball whenever I open Camino 2.0

Post by Thingmaker »

Sorry to necropost, but has Camino ever looked into this issue? It's never been resolved and launching Camino still takes several minutes.

Sean
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cflawson
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Re: Spinning beach ball whenever I open Camino 2.0

Post by cflawson »

No one on the development team was ever able to reproduce anything resembling this problem, but since this problem was last reported with a Gecko 1.9.0-based Camino, and Firefox had the same problem when it was using Gecko 1.9.0, I'd recommend trying again with Camino 2.1.2, and if that isn't any different, it's probably something different from what it was originally speculated to be.

cl
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