Platform/Features/RevampAboutMemory

Feature	Status	ETA	Owner
Revamp about:memory	Landed	Fx6	Nicholas Nethercote

Summary

Greatly improve about:memory.

Team

Who's working on this?

• Feature Manager: Nicholas Nethercote (nnethercote@mozilla.com, 'njn' on IRC)
• Lead Developer: Nicholas Nethercote

Release Requirements

• Stage 1: bug 633653.

After that, much of it can be done gradually, in a bug-by-bug fashion.

Next Steps & Open Issues

Follow-up bugs, most of which depend on 633653.

Use Cases

about:memory should be the first place anyone looks for any problem or question related to memory usage. (In particular, it should subsume OS tools like 'top', 'ps' and the Windows Task Manager.) If it doesn't answer the question, then more advanced tools can be used.

In particular, it will be very useful in bug reports. People often currently say vague things like "Firefox was using 1GB of memory" without explaining how they got that number. By cutting + pasting about:memory things will be a lot clearer.

Designs

See screenshots in bug 633653 for stage 1.

Goals

• Cutting + pasting the contents of about:memory into a text box should produce highly readable output.

• Eventually, most interesting parts of memory (eg. the used part of the heap) should be marked as being owned by a particular part of the system.

• Per-tab (or something like that) information.

Legend (remove if you like)

	Healthy: feature is progressing as expected.
	Blocked: feature is currently blocked.
	At Risk: feature is at risk of missing its targeted release.
ETA	Estimated date for completion of the current feature task. Overall ETA for the feature is the product release date.