Exactly one month after we have released our initial version of MemChaser, version 0.2 has been made publicly available. You can install the add-on as usual from addons.mozilla.org or if it is already installed, simply check for updates within the Add-ons Manager.
A couple of subtle changes have been made which will give a better experience for users. So we have combined the formerly two widgets in the Add-on bar into a single one to prevent other extensions from inserting their widgets in-between. At the same time the width has been reduced to not waste too much space (keep in mind that we are still blocked on a SDK bug which doesn’t let the widget size adapt to the content length dynamically).
Given the recent landing of the incremental garbage collector in Nightly builds of Firefox we had to do some extra unplanned updates to support this new feature. When you are running a Nightly build and an incremental GC happens, the ‘GC‘ label will be replaced with ‘iGC‘.
Further we have improved the parsing of the GC/CC console messages to allow us to add more interested entries dynamically. So this time we have added the reason and type (global or compartmental) for a GC, and the number of collected entries from the cycle collector. All three will be written together with all the other data to the log file and are not visible in the add-on bar.
As reported by an user MemChaser v0.1.1 was affected by some memory leaks which were caused by the Add-on SDK 1.4. Given the tireless efforts of the SDK devs nearly all of those leaks (except for widgets) have been fixed in version 1.5, which has been recently released and is now used by MemChaser 0.2.
Beside all those visible changes we also made some improvements to our development process. So we have added the Add-on SDK as a submodule to our own repository on Github. Also to get more traction we made the decision to move the MemChaser repository to the Mozilla account. And last but not least we implemented the Travis CI integration to get our code automatically tested with each check-in.
If you are interested in further information about the changes feel free to check our list of issues for 0.2.
We would also like to welcome everyone who has interests to help us with coding, ui work, or documentation. There are a lot of features we want to implement and need talented people for. Stop by on one of our channels and get in contact with us.
The font-size should be adjustable or just respect the host OS font size.
The values don’t mean anything. XXXms (XXs) …
Please give the values title attributes or labels or something. Better still, how about a Jetpack panel?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/latest/packages/addon-kit/docs/panel.html
We currently don’t have any control on the font settings in the widget. But a fix has already been checked in for Add-ons SDK 1.6. So we only will have to wait for. Also see our own tracking issue.
Re: missing tooltips, we already have an issue on our milestone 0.3 list to get those implemented for each of the entries. Given the pressure we had with 0.2 there was simply no time to get it implemented. And no, we don’t want to use a panel for that. Those are not tooltips.
Thanks for the work you put into memchaser.
In concert with profiles that differ only in extensions, I could track down most of my issues much faster than ever before.
Even memory issues related to long-time running Fx and many open tabs where now much easier to track.
Most fun is to use the same set of extensions and tabs open and view memusage over time. Great work is done on the recent nightlies (this last week).
E.g. start FX, rmem[160MB] load tab-set (all) rmem[310MB], let is sit idle for two hours, switch trough all tabs rmem[260MB]. Much better than mid January (can’t prof this, lost some data).
Thanks again for the work.
Yamaban, it’s great to hear that it was helpful for you even in such an early state. We are planning way more stuff to integrate into future releases of MemChaser. So keep an eye on our project page and if questions or issues arise don’t hesitate to contact us. Would be great if you could also give a review on AMO for MemChaser. Thanks.