Big news: late last week, generational garbage collection landed. It was backed out at first due to some test failures, but then re-landed and appears to have stuck.

This helps with performance. There are certain workloads where generational GC makes the code run much faster, and Firefox hasn’t been able to keep up with Chrome on these. For example, it has made Firefox slightly faster on the Octane benchmark, and there is apparently quite a bit of headroom for additional improvements.

Interestingly, its effect on memory usage has been small. I was hoping that the early filtering of many short-lived objects would make the tenured heap grow more slowly and thus reduce memory usage, but the addition of other structures (such as the nursery and store buffers) appears to have balanced that out.

The changes to the graphs at AWSY have been all within the noise, with the exception of the “Fresh start” and “Fresh start [+30s]” measurements in the “explicit” graph, both of which ticked up slightly. This isn’t cause for concern, however, because the corresponding “resident” graph hasn’t increased accordingly, and “resident” is the real metric of interest.

“Compacting Generational GC” is the #1 item on the current MemShrink “Big Ticket Items” list. Hopefully the “compacting” part of that, which still remains to be done, will produce some sizeable memory wins.