[PROGRAMMING] It's all a matter of knowing the right incantation...

[jducoeur]

There -- that seems to have worked.

For the past couple of months, one thing has been particularly annoying me about my new laptop. When I close the lid, it goes into Standby mode, as it should. Sometimes, when I open the lid, it instantly restarts, as it should. But sometimes it doesn't -- sometimes it takes a long time, even a couple of minutes, to wake up.

I finally twigged that the relevant factor was whether Firefox was running or not. And I remembered, in the back of my head, that I've read about Firefox' extreme swap behaviour before. Apparently, if you let Firefox sit minimized for a relatively long time (more than half an hour or so), it gives up nearly all of its memory to the OS, by aggressively trimming its active set. When it comes back to life, it needs to rebuild all of its state, and this can take a pretty long time -- especially if, like me, you have half a dozen tabs open at any given time. Usually this problem only shows up when you reopen Firefox from minimized, but it apparently also applies in my laptop-restart case.

Anyway, after a bunch of Googling around, I finally found the recipe for dealing with this. There's a hidden preference in Firefox, "config.trim_on_minimize", that deals with this. If you create this preference in about:config, and set it to false, the problem goes away. It means that Firefox is hogging system memory, but I don't care: I usually only have a couple of programs running on the laptop anyway.

It is one of those moments that makes me feel like a sort of proto-TechnoMage, though. You can bend your environment to your will, but only if you know the right sigils and signs, which are closely-guarded secrets of the hidden masters...

Comments

Ooo... thanks.

[pamelina.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's why my laptop sometimes won't wake up upon opening it.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

We (sml, who I don't think you've met) and I spent some time coming up with the "Programming" Sphere, a very silly extension to Mage: The Ascension's magic system. "Waving a dead chicken" is, I believe, only three dots...

Of course now we've extended it to Admin and HR, as we both assume more managerial roles. ("Getting an employee hired requires three successes on an extended Admin roll, and you need a caster with at least two dots in HR...")

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

I'll have to check that out and see if the tradeoff is worth it for me. I zeroed in on the problem being certain websites -- I always make sure I don't shut down with a window open on CNN, because that nearly always triggers the problem, but it's not the only one. I'm using hibernate, though, not standby, so my situation may be a bit different.

The most amusing misfeature I see in this area is this: My power switch is set to hibernate, and closing the cover is alsow set to hibernate. If you hit the power switch, but close the cover before it's completely shut down, on the next power up, it will restore to a state in the middle of hibernating, and continue the power-switch hibernation. I'm somewhat mystified as to how it successfully stores *two* hibernation states.

[cellio]

Some web sites -- and CNN is one -- push out auto-updates when they deem that the content in your browser is stale. A smart browser would find some way of saying "hey, I'm idle" and decline to accept the refresh (perhaps instead doing a refresh when activity is next detected in that app, for extra points), but I don't know of any that do.