{"id":1763,"date":"2012-02-16T10:54:02","date_gmt":"2012-02-15T23:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/?p=1763"},"modified":"2012-02-16T10:54:02","modified_gmt":"2012-02-15T23:54:02","slug":"mcafee-is-killing-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/2012\/02\/16\/mcafee-is-killing-us\/","title":{"rendered":"McAfee is killing us"},"content":{"rendered":"

A reader named AC commented<\/a> on last week’s MemShrink report<\/a> that Firefox was consuming lots of memory on his girlfriend’s computer (emphasis added by me):<\/p>\n

I am currently on my girlfriends laptop round at her house and I am surfing the net using Firefox 10.0.1. The memory usage is terrible. It may be because of the two McAfee add-ons that she has<\/strong>, I don\u2019t know, but I can see now first hand how some Firefox users are having an amazing experience and others are still lagging behind. The memory usage as opposed to being 200,000-230,000kb as it would be on my laptop with 11 beta 2 is about 350,000kb or more. That said, there is no loss of performance and that is what matters most. I am not looking for answers or solutions, merely saying that the same or very similar software used on one computer can perform completely differently on another and now I appreciate that even more having witnessed it for myself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I asked him to try turning off the McAfee add-ons, which he kindly did.\u00a0 The result<\/a> (emphasis again added by me):<\/p>\n

I did some very very rudimentary tests earlier at my girlfriends house on her laptop and here is what I found.<\/p>\n

With the two McAfee add-ons running everything was fine until I got to about 8 tabs and then the memory began to increase. Then it just climbed up to about 450,000 kb. If I was running the same tab load on my latop, I would expect just over half that amount of memory to be reported in task manager.<\/p>\n

I have to say that there was no loss of performance, but the amount of memory being used was very high for the tab load.<\/p>\n

The first tab that I had open was google.co.uk. I right clicked on that tab and hit “Close Other Tabs”. The memory stayed at 418,000 kb and that was it. It stayed at that level for about 10 minutes whilst I went and did other stuff. It wasn\u2019t going up or down. 400MB with just Google UK open and nothing else. It\u2019s diabolical.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So I then disabled the 2 McAfee add-ons and every went back to normal. I used a heavy tab load than before. I opened more tabs with more complex content. I must have had about 15 tabs open and the memory use peaked at 386,000 kb.<\/p>\n

Then I logged out of Facebook and Hotmail, without closing any tabs, and within 10 seconds the memory had dropped to 330,000 kb.<\/p>\n

Then I closed all but 3 tabs and within 30 seconds the memory was about 180,000.<\/p>\n

Then I closed all but one tab and the memory settled at just under 100,000 kb. Back to normal. Exactly how I would expect Firefox 10.0.1 to perform<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The extensions in question were McAfee ScriptScan for Firefox 14.4.1 and McAfee Site Advisor 3.4.1<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t have time to test them individually as things got hectic after that, but as you say Nicholas, the seemingly innocent extensions were ruining the memory performance of a perfectly good browser<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I could still load pages etc and navigate around as fast, but the numbers on task manager were sky high.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Firefox has a reputation in particular for not releasing memory when tabs are closed.\u00a0 <\/em> 75% of installed add-ons are not hosted on AMO<\/a>, and thus are out of Mozilla’s control.\u00a0 This is killing us.\u00a0 Bug 720856<\/a> is my best suggestion for dealing with badly written add-ons such as these ones, but even it feels like weak tea when the problem is so large.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A reader named AC commented on last week’s MemShrink report that Firefox was consuming lots of memory on his girlfriend’s computer (emphasis added by me): I am currently on my girlfriends laptop round at her house and I am surfing the net using Firefox 10.0.1. The memory usage is terrible. It may be because of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,30,4544,4546],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1763"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}