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.""

Comments

Strange, 1p/10 mins more than 12pp/5 mins?

[Red Flayer]

Firefox 3.0 b 1:

Loading a five pages into the browser - 38,644KB
Loading a single page and leaving the browser for 10 minutes - 63,764KB
Loading 12 pages into the browser and wait 5 minutes - 62,312KB

I wonder what would have happened had he loaded 12 pages and let the browser sit for 10 minutes -- would the memory usage still be less than the single page/10 mins test?

Seems to me that memory usage must still spiral under 3 beta, otherwise how would the single page/10 min usage be less than the 12pp/5 min test? Sure, it's not as bad, but that number really caught my eye... more testing is in order if I can get some time away from the in-laws over the holiday.

Re:How are they measuring?

[vally_manea]

From what I've heard this is common practice at MS. When the app gets minimized it releases/caches a lot of memory. There was a story on a MS person's blog but I'm to lazy to find it out.

Re:And Opera

[morgan_greywolf]

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!

Re:Yeah but it's still beta

[beh]

Actually, that 'low memory bug' has already been fixed - I've downloaded the beta and installed it on WinXP - after looking at 2 pages, Firefox 2 memory usage was at about 45MB; Firefox 3's memory usage was up to about 750MB after less than 5 minutes (and the same 2 pages; in two tabs, just as with Firefox 2.0.0.9), completely bringing the machine to a crawl (1GB mem; and apart from Firefox, Outlook, Eclipse and SquirrelSQL were open)...

I'm reverting back to Firefox 2 for the time being, and will file a bug report once I have some more time to find out what's causing the issue...

Re:not to point out the obvious

[CastrTroy]

What about a task manager extension for firefox that shows how much memory each extension is using? Seems like it could be useful. I mean, we know how much memory firefox in general is taking up, but it would be nice to get a breakdown of where that memory is going to.

Re:What a stupid "test"

[QuoteMstr]

Don't do that. "But I want to keep my applications in memory!" you might say. That's wrong. Virtual memory systems these days basically use main memory as a cache for the disk. It doesn't matter whether a page came from a file, an anonymous application allocation, or anywhere else. The kernel automatically keeps the most frequently used blocks in RAM and pages everything else out to disk. By using 0 for swappiness, you defeat that automatic management and force the kernel to treat application pages specially. You don't want to do that.

Re:How are they measuring?

[jafac]

Well - Microsoft may be distributing Sysinternals products; but Marc Russinovich's Blog postings are becoming less and less frequent.

AND - Sysinternals used to distribute the source on some of their tools. No longer. It's out there. But it's not legal.