No network, no problem!

I got a brand new smart phone, and the first thing I noticed is that it worth nothing without network. Wifi hotspot availability is uncertain, everybody has yet beg someone to get some access. 3G data is still expansive. Roaming above all, at 20$ bucks per megabyte, could ruine somebody looking at few youtube videos. And even 3G network is not always available, for example in subways, and will make your device as useful as a stone.

We already know the solution: data cache. At least, a device with some type of cache will be useful at some level. I want to bring with me my own files on any of my devices. This way, we do not rely on the cloud for every lookup, and we can sync with low cost network connexion when it becomes available. Mail is an obvious example of asynchronous system that is working well. With IMAP and a good mail client, you can get a cache of all your emails, read them when offline, even compose an email and send them later when network is back.

Another drastic example of a device that rely only on a cache is the WikiReader, that I bought recently. It has a cache of all 3 millions Wikipedia articles on a 8 Gb SSD card. It can be updated with a computer or by subscribing to an update service by old fashion mail. Never forget that a truck loaded with SSD cards has a lot of bandwith!

Though, keeping in sync multiple disconnected data sets is harder. Yet, many interesting projects, like the distributed replicated database system CouchDB, used in Ubuntu One for online services, borrow my contacts where ever I need them. At the file system level, I'm using Dropbox that replicates my files on all my devices. Beyong replication, it acts as a continuous backup, so I don't worry anymore with hard drive crashed. Also, HTML5 cache is a great addition, and can be used to lower your precious G3 bandwith, server load and lower latency. Those are example of disconnected aware cloud services, that I think are going to take off.

This said, sync all data does make sens only if the device belong to the user for a fair amount of time. In the case of shared workstation, for example a school lab, roaming profiles are known to be a disaster, because the data has to be synchronized from scratch multiple time, and it makes the cache useless. We may think of better synchonization, based on the content the user uses frequently, and fetch other things on demand. But the "keep it simple and stupid" way would be to make user reuse the same computer, or at least the same set of computers, and not flush the cache. Keeping users files on a shared computer is always tricky for privacy reasons, but providing encryption based on the user's credentials could be a solution. Another solution would be to let the student own and borrow their computer. With all those Linux mobile tablets that are going to hit the market soon, I think that it will create a great opportunity for providing affordable computers to each and every students. And with 16Gb of flash storage on basic models, there is enough room to cache almost everything! This way, the cache hit will be much higher, and users will be happier.

In summary, let's take a GPS as an example. Would you prefer a GPS that downloads all it's bitmap maps just-in-time, that rely heavily on network, or a GPS that is using it's embedded geo data. The later will not work without network, the later is not ofter updated, or even not at all. What I would consider the best design is to get a device with both. The mapping data should be embedded and rendered on the device itself, and this sort of cache should be updated each time you get network. Or even if you don't have all the data, you should be able to select areas to cache. 

In conclusion, the cloud is so fantastic that we sometimes forget that without a link to it, we're screwed. I consider that devices that are not designed to work without network is bad design, and those devices will end into the Computer History Museum soon.

Firefox memory management nightmare

Can you believe that you can crash any linux machine with a web page displaying stamp size images, while an iPod can display it without an glitch? Try this dead page with you browser, that displays large images resized and watch your memory usage.

WARNING: this page requires ~300Mb RAM to display!

https://pages.usherbrooke.ca/fgiraldeau/crashff/

Ok, what's going on? I did a small utility to monitor the memory usage of Firefox, and the memory usage was quite normal. Where did all this memory allocation occur? After few top, it appears that the Xorg process blew up. Here is a graph that show both process on crashff loading.

Memory consumption for crashff page loading according to time

The test shows the page loading, opening other tabs and coming back to the original page. The full scale image is transfered to the Xserver for rescaling the image. On localhost, it's fast, but when Firefox is started remotely, then all this data has to be transfered on the network! After a while, the image is flushed from Xserver, and display the tab requires doing all this work again. And because the Xserver allocates the memory, if you run out of memory, the Out Of Memory (OOM) killer of the kernel will be triggered, but it's likely to kill the Xorg process and leads to the user's session lost. This is really critical.

There is one optimization that may help this, and wanted to know the impact. When setting MOZ_DISABLE_IMAGE_OPTIMIZE to 1, it was supposed to change the behavior. Let see the same experiment with this environment value set.

Memory consumption for crashff page loading, with optimization, according to time

Ok, so we see that the Xorg process stays at some low level of memory usage, this time firefox blows up. At least, if the user hits the memory limit, then only the Firefox process gets killed, and the user's session will not crash.

I did also the test with Opera 10.60.6386 and Konqueror 4.4.2, and the result is mostly the same as with Firefox with optimization. Konqueror uses a less memory, and doesn't deallocate the tab, so when displaying it again, it's really fast. Here are the graphs.

So MOZ_DISABLE_IMAGE_OPTIMIZE does the trick, and IMHO, this option should be the default.

Note: this blog is related to this firefox bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395260