firefox: java_vm stays active forever!

Cameron Simpson cs at zip.com.au
Mon Apr 4 02:19:16 UTC 2005


On 03Apr2005 16:07, Gustavo Seabra <gustavo.seabra at gmail.com> wrote:
| Ie noticed a weird thing here. I using firefox and, whenever I open a
| web page that needs java, for example,
| 
| http://www.nyu.edu/pages/mathmol/txtbk2/btube.htm 
| 
| it opens a java_vm process. So far so good. The problem is that, if I
| close the tab (or even the window) that needed the java, or go to
| another page that doesn need java, the java_vm process just stays
| there forever. It never stops, unless I close all instances of
| firefox, or kill the process manually, which crashes firefox
| completely.
| 
| Is there anywhere I can set it to kill the java_vm process when it's
| not needed anymore? (I know I can do that in Konqueror, so I thought
| it should be possible in Firefox as well...)

Possibly not. The JVM gets started once and hangs around because a JVM
has a noticable startup cost. If you want web pages with Java content to
be "snappy" in loading (bandwidth aside) it helps if the JVM is already
present and initialised, and so it doesn't go away when idle.

Provided it's consuming no CPU then it's no added burden on your system;
memory contention will page it out to your swap space if necessary.

Do you have a technical reason for wanting it gone or does it just seem
"untidy" to your eye?

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

>From a programmer's point of view, the user is a peripheral that types
when you issue a read request.  - Peter Williams




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