Modern browsers are some of the most complicated programs ever written. For example, the main Firefox library on my system is over 130Mbytes. Doing 130MB of IO poorly can be quite a performance hit, even with SSDs! :). Few people seem to understand how memory-mapped IO works. There are no pre-canned tools to observe it on Linux, thus even even fewer know how to observe it. Years ago, when I was working on Firefox startup performance, I discovered that libraries were loaded backwards (blog1, b...