Im googling and searching other forums for this, but I just wanna ask it here anyway.

Im just wondering if anyone here knows why Mozilla has numerous processes when it is launched. When I use the program 'top' I see 1 mozilla, and 5 mozilla-bin.

They all have different PIDs, but they have the same VIRT and SHR numbers. Im guessing VIRT means virtual memory and SHR means shared memory. I think I have an idea why mozilla does it by I wanna know if you guys know the real answer. Thanks.

These are different threads, using - as you guessed - the same shared memory. This kind of threading is known as linux-threads and is part of the huge feature set of the GNU libc library (which contains functionality for pretty much everything, and used by pretty much everything too). A newer, revised and lighter implementation is available. It is known as NPTL or Native Posix Linux Threads. If you install a glibc version compiled with NPTL you will find that instead of using full blown threads, threaded applications will use lightweight threads that do not show up as separate ones in the output the of top and ps programs. Since I started running glibc with NPTL I only have one firefox process and one firefox-bin process instead of the five (or so) firefox-bin threads, as an example.

A lot of more or less advanced applications are threaded. Compare with xmms and beep-media-player - these behave in the same way as Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox.


Håkan

Ah gotcha. Thats what I thought. I was wondering why they had to show it like that and not in a tree mode. Anyway thanks alot! Im gonna look up NPTL and see if its right for me.