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Comparing Memory Usage of Firefox 2 vs 3
DaMan writes "ZDNet picks up on yesterday's Firefox 3 beta 1 review by comparing the memory usage of Firefox 2 against the latest beta. The results from one of the tests is quite interesting, after loading 12 pages and waiting 5 minutes, 2 used 103,180KB and 3 used 62,312KB. IE used 89,756KB.""
firefox 3 doesn't have any plugins yet, last i checked it was plugin writers who were blamed for all the memory issues by Mozilla
btw i did same test in IE7 and Opera9 and only got 30-40MB usage
I'm assuming you loaded the exact same 5 pages with the same ads that the ZDnet testers did?
This guy's the limit!
Also, seems like a pretty crappy test to me, especially considering that most of the complaints with Firefox are with memory leaks, and not memory usage from opening a few pages. What happens after an entire work day of using the browser? Is there a significant difference in memory at that point? People who open their browser and look at 10 pages, then close it again will rarely ever have a problem with memory usage in Firefox. However, those of use who leave it open for days at a time, doing web development, and constantly looking at new pages are the ones who need to worry. It's like comparing the performance Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005 on a project that only has 5 classes.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Memory usage really isn't a huge issue for most end-users. Sure if it was sucking up 800 meg with 2 or 3 tabs open people would complain but right now people are just starting to get used to the idea of tabs much less use 12 of them. The memory usage now is hardly a system stopper for most people who only run their browser and mail client and maybe an office suite and picture viewer.
The Working Set (physical memory) size will drop, but the memory consumption (Private Bytes, Virtual Memory) will be the same. When a window is minimized, Windows mark the memory pages as candidates to be relocated in case of memory shortage. When you restore IE focus the Working Set size will return to the previous size.
Task Manager sucks, use Sysinternals' Process Explorer.
Not for modern webpages. A single flash ad requires a couple of megs, tack on the capability to have multiple pages open in a single browser (that adds to the memory usage a little), a bunch of these ads, and the actual page content and it's pretty small.
Actually something of interest I've noticed is that since I got NoScript my FF ram usage has dropped considerably. I rarely get about 83MB with FF2 now, because it doesn't have to load the plugins and such.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
IANAWBD (Web Browser Developer), but... there's just so much data for web pages now. You've got plugged-in interpreted flash code, graphics that need to be kept in RAW formats in memory because of speed, the full length and width of the page on an in-memory surface to pan through on a window.
Even then it still needs a dynamic layout for CSS and scripting on the fly. And even then some scripting is safe, some is not, so there are rules that the code has to implement like pop-up blockers, password managers, warnings on insecure pages, warnings on cross-site scripting, etc. All that and the browsers STILL need to be able to sensibly parse and display completely borked pages with invalid HTML.
Nevermind maintaining history, cache, cookies, referring pages, bookmarks.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Seems like the author is playing up to some feature in FireFox 4 that releases un-viewed pages from memory after a certain amount of time.
I bet if he re-clicked on each of the 12 tabs after the 5 minutes was up, that memory usages would go back up again.
"using less memory" isnt always desirable. I have 4 GB of RAM in my system and i'd rather if the applications USED THAT RAM, to keep application response "instant", rather than un-caching stuff, only to pull it back into memory again when I want to see it.
Because mostly on Windows, most people's RAM is stretched to the limit, if a simple program that people use every day (Firefox) will decrease memory usage, then they can focus on speed and in the end, if Firefox can be 2X as fast as IE, Konqueror(and by extension Safari), and Opera people will switch to it. And I actually have around 512 MB on both my Laptop and Desktop with the Desktop currently running Xubuntu and my laptop running Ubuntu 7.10 happily. And when Linux can resurrect a "dead" system like a crashed Windows system that someone may give you for like $10 that happens to have 256 MB of RAM on it and a slower but usable processor like a Pentium III, Linux can run fine on it however, if FF runs slowly, most people have little need for a computer if they can't browse the web with it.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Embrace, extend, extinguish
There's no point RAM sitting there, not being used. It might as well be used to speed up page loading etc. rather than doing nothing.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Uh... They're not exactly extinguishing it if they're allowing free, unencumbered download of the product. They just bought SysInternals a while back so they distribute their stuff now.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I'm sorry, but what did your reply have to do with the grandparent post? Shouldn't you have started a new thread instead of hopping on a +5 funny first post?
May the Maths Be with you!
I am going to guess that you have a couple dozen extensions installed on firefox and most of them you don't ever use (or even think about). Get rid of the extensions you're not actively using and see if that helps both the memory and speed problems you're seeing.
Alternatively, you could use Opera.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Although I'm sure there are some Slashdotters who run Firefox on a 350 Mhz PII with 256Mb of memory, that is really not issue for me. Most people with a recent PC probably have over a Gig of memory and more like 2 onboard.
CPU utilization where the browser all of a sudden is sucking down 100% of your CPU or of a single core and/or crashes are just as important (or more). More than likely the memory leaks have related browser stability issues that can be addressed with single fixes but if the browser continues to have runaway CPU issues and crashes it will not matter HOW small a footprint of memory it uses.
I used to browse the web on a machine with 8 MB of RAM. Total, including the OS. At the time, real time decoding of a JPEG was extremely difficult, but my current CPU has 100 times the clock speed and is 64 bit and has vector processing features. Yet, browsers still seem to make the same class of CPU-memory tradeoffs that made sense on a 68030. For example, I may have ten tabs open in a window. I can only see one of them at any given moment, but the fully decoded images are all sitting in memory for all ten web pages, despite the fact that the page could be re-rendered almost instantly on a modern system.
Since browsing a few web pages is seldom the only thing I do with my computer, I go and do other stuff in Lightwave, Blender, Photoshop, whatever, then I come back to my web browser, and I wait while the whole working set gets swapped back in. Then, I click on the tab I want, and I wait while the working set for that tab gets swapped back in. If it just rerendered the page from the original bits, rather than using cached decoded images sucking up RAM and whatnot, it'd have almost nothing to reload and worst case performance would be orders of magnitude better. Hooray for "optimisation!"
Oh, and can we get some ninjas to fucking kill Flash. Seriously, I shouldn't need a bunch of script blocking and flash blocking extensions just to be able to browse the fucking intarwebs without having a seizure.
No, I don't have Flash at all, yet Moz is just as much of a resource hog.
I use NoScript, so no Javascript in-use here 99% of the time, either...
A pop-up blocker is a passive device, simply refusing to execute certain code, it saves CPU time, not the other way around. Similar for pointless warnings about page contents.
And again, I have the password manager disabled, so it should not be using any resources.
Point me to the "borked pages" code, and I'll be damn happy to remove it, if it will give a huge performance boost. No question.
Although it doesn't handle javascript (which I disable with Moz anyhow), Dillo does basically everything you've described, using a fraction as much memory.
Right now, with the same 3 tabs open, Dillo is using 1/5th the memory of FF2.0.0.9, and that's just for starters. The performance disparity is much larger... Much of the time, the next page will be loaded just about the instant I finish clicking on the link. It's like the difference between night and day.
The real shame of it is that the Dillo project is on hold now, even though with the tiniest fraction of the resources of the Mozilla project, it could very quickly become an absolutely amazing web browser. It's really the same thing that happened with Links-GUI... Two amazingly promising browsers, going nowhere.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I don't see that memory usage remains a problem for most users. It's just the vocal few who are having memory problems. The main problem is that these users assume this is part of the "normal" experience of using Firefox, so they complain that every user must also be seeing the same thing. They take no steps to fix or report their problems, as they consider the problem to be "well-known" and think developers must be idiots for not being able to see it.
If you're still having serious problems with Firefox, try creating a new profile and installing the Firefox 3 Beta. If you still have problems, discuss them on the MozillaZine Builds forum. If the problems do not get resolved, just switch to another browser. It's not normal to experience serious problems when browsing, so I don't see why anyone accepts it as part of the "normal" experience.
I agree that the damage to Firefox's reputation is already done. I've found that no matter how many reports come out that Firefox doesn't have a severe and obvious memory problem, the few reports that show a problem are the ones that become popular. If any of them just included instructions to reproduce the problem on other computers, those reports would be productive. Somehow, they always seem to leave that part out.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Yes, but it's equally inefficient for Firefox to have to swap this sort of thing in and out when the OS is under memory pressure.
What we really need is a mechanism for e.g. Firefox to use large amounts of memory to speed up page loading when there's plenty of memory, but to optimize for a small memory footprint when I've got ten zillion Gimp windows and Picasa open.
Why should Firefox behave in exactly the same way in two totally different situations?
Wasn't the original point of Firefox (pre-1.0) that it was a rewrite that was supposed to use less memory and be faster than any other browser, as opposed to the browser in Mozilla Communicator/Suite (now Mozilla Seamonkey)? I have a friend who uses Seamonkey constantly and still swears it's faster than Firefox. On the other hand, I'm running several Firefox extensions, and whatever speed Firefox (2.0) is right now, I think it's worth it. (Opera tends to be very fast, by the way. I just like my extensions too much.)
That's a bogus argument. Virtual size is absolutely unimportant as far as the performance is concerned. You have a fixed amount of memory in the system and if Firefox takes up a lot of real memory, other parts of the system will feel the pain. The fact that the *real* memory usage of FF 3.0 is low means that it is not being greedy about using system resources. Every process has the full VM size to play with, so looking at the VM size doesn't really tell you much about what effect that process will have on the rest of the system.
Is it just me or does it seem like 60MB or even 34MB is a LOT of memory for something that browses Web pages?
But a browser doesn't just browse web pages. A browser is a limited form operating system, as it has an execution language (Javascript) and environment (the DOM). A mail client is relatively simple as it's just a texty protocol. A browser is HTML + XML + CSS + HTTP/S + JPG/PNG/GIF/etc renderers + embedded plugins + caches, and in case of FF, it has XPCOM and various other extensible subsystems.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
The raw web data transfered for those pages couldn't be more than 10MB, why do they need 60MB?
Do you think that DOM editing of the document tree, for example, should be implemented by actually editing the raw data gotten from the web? Or, for another example, when you double click on a web page, how do you think the word on which the clicked happened is found in the document? I guess you are imagining that the whole document is reparsed, the placement on screen for every single thing is recomputed, reflowed and so on, and then the word in the click coordinates is found? Have you not considered that web browsers developers decided an age ago to do some caching? Don't you imagine that that caching might take more memory that the raw data? Have you even considered the reasonability of what you are asking? How is it on earth that you see yourself as fit to make browser design suggestions?
They really should be caching the raw data, not uncompressed bitmaps of the pages already rendered.Of course, I'd love to see how a browser designed according to your ideas has to uncompress every image on a web page each time the user moves the scrollbar a pixel down.
Have you considered allocating resources to work on the problem of hunting those leaks and fixing them? One of the two browsers you mention provides you with full sources so you have what to work on. You seem to be one of the many people extracting value from Firefox: maybe you could put some value back...