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Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension RAMBack manually frees up memory from Firefox to keep your favorite web browser running light. Once installed, RAMBack adds a Clear Caches entry to...

Firefox 3 javascript performance and memory usage study on linux

Read the hype on every new web browser released or due out this year, and you'll see claims that every one of them is "faster" than all the others. You could compare super-specific tests and decipher...

Weblog ScienCentral reports that when you can't come up with an answer that's sitting on the tip of your tongue, you're best off forgetting about it altogether. That's because, according to a study...

When you absolutely have to commit your presentation notes, interview points, or other words to memory, a Tachistoscope, which rotates images at varying speeds, can be the next best thing to a neural...

Windows only: Instead of dropping cash on a new stick of RAM for that old computer, go grab a free license for the normally $20 memory manager TweakRAM—today only. TweakRAM speeds up your...

Scientists have long held that seven items—be they images, numbers, or tasks—was the best a brain could manage to hold at once, but LiveScience points out that, without specific practice,...

Writing things down, on paper or on-screen, is the best way to make sure you remember important info and tasks, but sometimes you've got to rely on your plain old brain to keep essential data sorted...

Windows only: Killing runaway, memory-gobbling processes from Windows' task manager is easy—if you know the name of every process and thread on your system and which apps they match up with....

Next time you need to quickly memorize a small piece of information, Wired suggests that you may actually have better luck retaining the information if you distract yourself.In 2007, researchers...

Create or browse interactive timelines with webapp Dipity. The service can create any sort of timeline you want, but it really shines when creating a personal timeline; that's because Dipity...

Windows only: Remember everything you've learned using spaced repetition with SuperMemo. From the Wired article on its creator, Piotr Wozniak: SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal...

Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Firefox makes it pretty easy to save all your open tabs into a bookmark folder, but Taboo makes it really simple to keep everything, including form text and scroll...

"Finally found it ... the patch below solves the sparsemem crash and the test system boots up fine now," announced Ingo Molnar. He described the patch as fixing a "memory corruption and crash on 32-bit x86 systems. If a !PAE x86 kernel is booted on a 32-bit system with more than 4GB of RAM, then we call memory_present() with a start/end that goes outside the scope of MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS." He included a source snippet with the loop that could corrupt memory, "depending on what that memory is, we might crash, misbehave or just not notice the bug." Ingo went on to note that the bug was first introduced with sparsemem support in the 2.6.16 kernel:

"I believe this was the reason why my many bisection attempts were unsuccessful: the bug pattern was not stable and seemingly working kernels had the memory corruption too. It was pure luck that v2.6.24 'worked' and v2.6.25-rc9 broke visibly."

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Source: KernelTrap - Kernel news

"Allocations of larger pages are not reliable in Linux. If larger pages have to be allocated then one faces various choices of allowing graceful fallback or using vmalloc with a performance penalty due to the use of a page table," began Christoph Lameter, describing the third version of his virtual compound page support patchset. He continued, "a virtual compound allocation means that there will be first of all an attempt to satisfy the request with physically contiguous memory. If that is not possible then a virtually contiguous memory will be created." Christopher proposed two advantages:

"1. Current uses of vmalloc can be converted to allocate virtual compounds instead. In most cases physically contiguous memory can be used which avoids the vmalloc performance penalty. 2. Uses of higher order allocations (stacks, buffers etc) can be converted to use virtual compounds instead. Physically contiguous memory will still be used for those higher order allocs in general but the system can degrade to the use of vmalloc should memory become heavily fragmented."

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Source: KernelTrap - Kernel news