Categories
about:memory Firefox Memory allocation Memory consumption MemShrink Performance

Better documentation for memory profiling and leak detection tools

Until recently, the documentation for all of Mozilla’s memory profiling and leak detection tools had some major problems.

  • It was scattered across MDN, the Mozilla Wiki, and the Mozilla archive site (yes, really).
  • Documentation for several tools was spread across multiple pages.
  • Documentation for some tools was meagre, non-existent, or overly verbose.
  • Some of the documentation was out of date, e.g. describing tools that no longer exist.

A little while back I fixed these problems.

  • The documentation for these tools is now all on MDN. If you look at the MDN Performance page in the “Memory profiling and leak detection tools” section, you’ll see a brief description of each tool that explains the circumstances in which it is useful, and a link to the relevant documentation.
  • The full list of documented tools includes: about:memory, DMD, areweslimyet.com, BloatView, Refcount tracing and balancing, GC and CC logs, Valgrind, LeakSanitizer, Apple tools, TraceMalloc, Leak Gauge, and LogAlloc.
  • As well as consolidating all the pages in one place, I also improved some of the pages (with the help of people like Andrew McCreight). In particular, about:memory now has reasonably detailed documentation, something it has lacked until now.

Please take a look, and if you see any problems let me know. Or, if you’re feeling confident just fix things yourself! Thanks.