whimboo/memchaser — Issue #66: indicate when incremental GC has been disabled
Author: amccreight
Created: 2012-02-19 16:12:39+00:00
State: open

When the GC detects certain unsafe situations, it will automatically disable incremental GC. This is intended to deal with addons that have not been updated to deal with incremental GC safely, but there appear to be at least two situations in the browser itself (bugs 728683 and 728686) that cause incremental GC to turn off.

It would be great if MemChase had some kind of warning displayed near the GC if both the following are true:
a) you are in a build where incremental GC is supported
b) incremental GC has been disabled

I think (a) can be checked by looking for an incremental setting, and of course only needs to be done once per browser session.

I'm not sure how to detect (b). There's some kind of setting in about:support that indicates it, so maybe it is possible to check there. This setting should be checked frequently (maybe once per GC if it isn't too slow), so that user actions can be correlated easily to the incremental GC turning off.