(via Digg)
One Federico Mena Quintero showed a proof-of-concept on how to reduce memory consumption of Mozilla Firefox on your PC.
When you run Mozilla or Firefox and load a web page with images, it stores the uncompressed images as pixmaps in the X server. In particular, it seems to maintain live pixmaps for all the images in all the tabs that you have open; even if a tab is not visible, the images will be in your X server’s memory.
When you exit Firefox, the X server is smart enough to return this memory to the kernel.
Web pages use compressed images, of course, to reduce download time. These images will likely take up a lot of space when uncompressed.
Read more about his explanation here.
I love stumbleupon for being able to show me this site. immediate fan now. I have viewed some really poor web sites on stumble and when I discovered this, I immediately knew it had been good! This article is entertaining especially for someone like me haha. I’ve been attempting to read a lot more these days and being able to discover a site like this is good for my education. Love what you are doing, looking forward to reading more!