I've been noticing lately that OWB is using a lot of memory. If I login to Facebook, OWB will use about 500mb of RAM! Right now just browsing MorphZone it's using about 300mb. Should I just delete OWB and reinstall?

No. It's not a bug in your system. It's because Webkit, which OWB is based upon, doesn't handle memory leaks very well. And they are not in a hurry to fix it in an age of several GB RAM as standard.

You have to live with it sadly. What I do is that I have my tabs saved every time I quit OWB and if I start running out of memory I quit and restart. After a while, you stop thinking about this even. It becomes rutine.

It's actually more due to the fact that MorphOS does not support the memory allocation models other systems do: modern OSes allow you to allocate virtual heap without using actual physical memory until you touch the said block: WebKit's js engine *reserves* a lot of RAM, which on MorphOS must be allocated immediately from the global physical RAM reserves. On modern OSes this just wastes virtual address space.

@jacadcaps

Thanks for the clarification. You learn something new every day

Is there something that can be done to fix this?

I deleted the OWB installation and re-installed with Grunch. Memory consumption is lower than what it was.. but it's better then where I was at.. just browsing for a few hours would fill up my memory! Thanks for the infos..

THanks for the clarification to understand that missing features in MorphOs are the problem and not OWB itself. Though it is a very annyoing problem because I so often get OWB crashes or better to say: "asking" to crash or to quit because it cannot reserve 5 or 8MB although I still have 300 or 400 MB of free RAM. This disturbs working with OWB many times a day because I have to quit and reload many times. Is there sure nothing that can be done about it? I understand it when RAM is full but not when it is only half full and still hundreds of MB free so the requested size would fit 40 or 50 times in the still free area.

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Yes, dropping backwards compatibility.

So when I have 400 MB free and one page requires 8MB which are still available many times, then OWB can nothing do about it but it must ask to crash?

> I understand it when RAM is full but not when it is only half full and still hundreds
> of MB free so the requested size would fit 40 or 50 times in the still free area.

The amount of free total memory is not the only deciding factor. As a result from fragmentation, you also have to take into account the largest free memory block available. Allocation of a certain amount of memory needs a free contiguous memory block of at least the same size.
For monitoring of the largest free memory block available I recommend using MemoryGauge.sbar:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6453&forum=9&start=16

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I'm ready. My vote is for 'do it'.

yes, me too. But before this happens and we can have it on our machines I welcome every smaller solution to it, too.

I can wait for the ISA shift

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I remember sometimes get "Application Is Meditating" annoying error which can only go away by restarting. There is no easy way that I know of to terminate a process instead. Please fix the error.

Also, I never understood the backwards compatibility for two main reasons. 1. Risk of crash errors is not sufficient reason to tie down unsupported software as a requirement to use MorphOS. Just put it in an emulator and or rewrite the software, and or port MorphOS to MiniMig.

2. I never got a legacy Amiga program to function. What am I doing wrong?

ISA Shift request: Just port it to Efika MX Smartbook or equivalent device.

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Go for it. Too bad we cannot make poll in here anymore ;)



[ Edited by pampers 05.11.2014 - 07:08 ]

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There may be people who want to keep backward compatibility... These votes may distort your imaginary polls' result.

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That means that application has crashed and it's usually application's fault. Fixing should be done by the author of the application.

If you click the close gadget of such crashed application, you should get a requester asking if it should be closed and resources freed as much as possible. Another method is to use ikill command and "shoot" the crashed application window. But anyway, in such situations you can't be sure if something else is messed too and it's safer to reboot anyway.


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Emulator doesn't help if you want to use for example 68k commands, libraries or other system components to enhance your main system. Also emulated applications don't share system clipboard, arexx ports, or even filesystem, which are needed to communicate between programs in many cases.

You are probably using 68k arexx library yourself too, for example. And probably some other stuff too.

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You're forgetting that legacy program shoudn't bang the non existing Amiga HW. So, games and some older apps are out of question. Programs should be OS friendly and function on RTG screen and use AHI if using audio. So, you've probably tried wrong kind of programs. Most utilities, shell programs, newer apps etc are working just fine.


[ Edited by jPV 05.11.2014 - 11:05 ]

> port MorphOS to MiniMig.

MorphOS for m68k? What for?

> I never got a legacy Amiga program to function. What am I doing wrong?

Which ones have you tried?

> ISA Shift request: Just port it to Efika MX Smartbook or equivalent device. :-)

There are ARM devices with multiple times the performance of the Efika MX, therefore I'd be against restricting it to equivalent devices :-)

@connor

It's strange that OWB crashes while having enough memory left. It rarely happens to me. Maybe you have a faulty RAM?

@all

Well, we have diskussed this before and it's safe to assume that the MorphOS Team is already thinking about what the best option for a ISA shift is. Remember, it's not just about what platform is the "best", but also which a small team like theirs can realistically do.

That said, I'm reserving money for the day I need to buy new hardware and a new licence. My bet is that regardless what hardware the Team choose to support, the end result will be AWESOME!

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Are you sure it's saying it's because of the memory needs but not for other reason? What does it say in the requester? Because I for example get similar requesters with "assertion failed" text after trashing the memory with SimpleMail/68k :) With a quick look it looks like out of memory requester, but it isn't :) Luckily we now have better MorphOS port of SM and I haven't seen those OWB requesters anymore...

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And I presume you already know my "imaginary polls' result"?

@ Yasu

No it's no faulty memory. It is working in all other situations when memory is almost full. I can fill it with all the other apps that I use. Only OWB makes these problems.


@ jPV

It also happens when I do not use 68k apps at all. It is definitely OWB. What it says? This one:
Failed to allocate 5411766 bytes.
Unfortunately, WebKit doesn't check allocations and crashes in such situation.
You can either:
- Crash
- Retry
- Quit

I even got this message only because I hit Ctrl+T to open a new tab!

Weird... I haven't seen that kind of behaviour on my machines. Only when memory really is used.

Try "memtest extensive" in shell just in case?

has already been done. the memory is not faulty, it is all working

@connor

Strange indeed. My G5 does not behave like that.

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As mentioned before, it could very well be that your largest block isn't enough, even for a simple new tab, because a blank page still involves memory hungry steps, in particular :
- allocating the cairo surface (but since i manage it myself, it's properly handled and it wouldn't crash if the allocation failed).
- instanciate webkit js heap stuff, which can take several megabytes.