Re: top that shows "Web Content" (was Re: Recommended editor for novice programmers?)

[rhkramer@gmail.com]

On Saturday, September 09, 2017 10:53:29 PM Nick Boyce wrote:
> AFAIK the 'Web Content' process was introduced by Mozilla when Firefox
> switched to a multi-process model for the browser binary - you may have
> seen people moaning about it: Mozilla calls it 'electrolysis/e10s' and it
> delivers such things as "only one tab will crash, rather than the whole
> browser".  

Thanks very much for this informative response--you even provided the date / 
revision number of the change!

So, I'm now reading up on electrolysis--hadn't seen / heard anything about it 
before now.  The first thing I started to read (still more tabs open to skim / 
read) indicates that the first iterations of e10s just put all the web content 
in one process, but maybe future ones (maybe even by now), maybe each tab will 
be a separate process, which is the point at which, at least usually, one 
crashed tab will not bring down the entire browser.

> I noticed the new process for the first time within the last
> month but wasn't sure how long it had been there ... I was trying to find
> out where all my RAM was going, and the sight of it made my blood run cold
> till I found out what it was.  

I guess I haven't looked at top since something like August 21, thus hadn't 
noticed the change--not looking at top in that time is a good thing, because 
it implies I had no problems that made me look at top ;-)

> I believe the ESR release channel gained
> the multiprocess feature with the change from release 45.x.y to release
> 52.x.y (Debian tracks the ESR channel), and my Wheezy systems received
> FF52.2.0 on 21st.August.
 
Thanks again!

OH, and for pointing out that "Web Content" is a process--I should have 
recognized that, but did not till I read your reply.  ;-)  (I guess, at first, 
I thought it was just some magical thing that magically separated Firefox's 
memory use into two parts, one that just reflected the content (well, it is 
that, but by virture of being a separate process).