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Comparing Memory Usage of Firefox 2 vs 3

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-don't-remember-nothing dept.

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.""

2 of 402 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How are they measuring? by Lemmingue · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:And Opera by forkazoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is it just me or does it seem like 60MB or even 34MB is a LOT of memory for something that browses Web pages?

    I mean, people used to make fun of GNU Emacs, saying things like it stands for eight megabytes and constantly swapping or eventually malloc()'s all computer storage. Emacs takes somewhere around 10MB or so on a RHEL4 box, and that thing is practically an operating system. It reads mail! Firefox doesn't even read mail, and it takes 60MB. Opera reads mail, but still 34MB seems just too big, too.

    Maybe I'm just getting to be a cranky old man. Now you kids get offa my lawn!


    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.