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Real-World Firefox 3 Memory Usage Leads the Field
An anonymous reader writes "The author developed a program to snapshot memory usage per process every 3 seconds on Windows. Using this he recorded 3 hours of memory usage for five different browsers under real-world usage scenarios: Safari 3.1, Firefox 3, Flock 1.2 (a browser based on Firefox 2), Opera 9.5, and Internet Explorer 8. A million data points indicate that Firefox 3 has a surprising advantage over the other browsers tested. These are real-world tests and not contrived benchmarks."
Not really surprised though.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Interesting test - pretty amazing how FF3 basically flatlines at around 120 MBytes for over 2 hours of usage ... would have
been interesting if the same methodology could be used
with FF2 to see how much of an improvement FF3 is over that
and how well the
leaks were fixed.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
I find that for certain hours of the day (namely in the evening) My memory usage skyrockets. It probably has to do with the increased number of images I am loading :D
We'll wait for Apple to come along and supply these.
No I'm not an Apple basher - I'm an avid Apple user, but even I look at some of their benchmarks and shake my head in amusement.
The Mothership
IIRC the memory displayed in process manager isn't necessarily the memory requested/used by the program, but merely what Windows has allocated, partially based on the applications requirements and partially based on what Windows _thinks_ the program needs.
As such there's room for applications to look like they're using more memory than they are which can lead to misleading stats. If this test has only taken into account the memory windows has allocated it doesn't necessarily act as a measure of how efficient the program is at least, just how good it is at playing Window's memory management system.
Service Not Available.
At the time of posting this, there were like, 10 comments in the thread. Assuming that only 10% of all /.ers RTFA, that means that the site can support only 1 simultaneous user.
A One that isn't cold, is scarcely a One at all.
Blown to bits with only enough time for 3 people to comment.
Maybe Adobe will actually make a Linux/FF Shockwave plugin (Yeah yeah, I know, fat chance)...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Already /.-ed? Or do I have to use any of the mentioned browsers... :-)
Quisque verborum suorum optimus interpres...
If they didn't compare with Dillo/lynx, it's meaningless. Also, already slashdotted.
But I may have to.
You failed at failing, I applaud your skillz.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Between:
.the individual numbers should not be compared to each other...
...how is this supposed to be taken seriously? "Contrived benchmarks" at least provide consistent and reliable results. They may not provide a completely accurate picture of real world browsing, but it's a hell of a lot better than this anecdotal "test".
These aren't stress tests, and I probably never went over 4 windows in each browser, with at most 3 tabs in each window.(Emphasis mine)
and
Am I the only one that thinks although firefox 3 is much faster, firefox 2 was much more stable? I'm running it on vista, XP sp3, and ubuntu machines and FF3 crashes on all 3 of them.
Don't get overexcited just yet. Let me quote some of the most important parts of the article that were completely overlooked in the summary for some reason:
"These results are from opening Memory Watcher and then using the browser between 9,000 and 11,000 seconds (close to 3 hours). Each browser is tested in a separate session, and there are brief periods of inactivity throughout the time period. [...] The above profiles are not a direct comparison in any way, but they offer a visualization of trending in the memory behavior of the layout engines and interfaces. [...]These aren't stress tests, and I probably never went over 4 windows in each browser, with at most 3 tabs in each window. [...] An automation script will never give the same insight into performance over time as will this sort of profile." [emphasis added]
In other words, it is evident that there was no guarantee whatsoever that every browser would display exactly the same sequence of web pages. It is easy to jump to conclusions that if Firefox has used the least memory then it must "[have] a surprising advantage over the other browsers." But is it a logical course of reasoning? Or only a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy combined with wishful thinking? The truth is that the amount of memory used during an hour of downloading web pages is strongly correlated with the speed of downloading and displaying said web pages. Is it the case that Firefox couldn't download, format and display pages as quickly as Internet Explorer because of the native Windows internal API hooks that help Explorer work faster than any independent browser could possible aspire to? That is quite possible. Unfortunately the results of that experiment are inconclusive and the methodology was unreliable.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Final memory usage in MB
Safari 636.9
Firefox 3 111.8
Flock (Firefox 2) 191.9
Opera 9.5 190.6
Internet Explorer 194.4
As the server is (already!?) down, I didn't yet have a chance to RTFA. So perhaps it is in the article somewhere, but I couldn't help wondering: how did they actually measure memory usage?
I'm asking because, these days, that pretty much amounts to rocket science.
Different operating systems report memory usage differently, even between different versions of the same OS (yes, I'm looking at you, Vista vs. XP). If they used "top" or its equivalent, it matters a lot whether they looked at real usage, virtual memory size (can be huge but that doesn't say anything) or what-have-you. Some OS's cheat quite a bit in what memory is reported as being "free" or "available", as well. Then we get to questions like "does it include the size of shared libraries", if not, is that fair if the libraries are really only used by that one application? Etc. etc.
So I'm not saying memory using doesn't matter (it very much does), it's just hard to measure it exactly. And, any attempts at doing so, should be documented precisely.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
"The system is Windows Vista SP1, and the computer has 3.0+ GB of RAM."
3.0+?? that's not very, er..exact. just like his test.
What use is consitent and reliable when you are inaccurate? What company do you work for? I need to know so I can run away from your products as fast as possible.
Hmm, seems like someone is trying to scale the "research" away.... I don't like M$ but I use it for post-development corrections... Wouldn't it be fair to use Safari 4 DP if you are using IE 8b1?
Using this he recorded 3 hours of memory usage for five different browsers under real-world usage scenarios,
He surfed porn for three hours? Must have callouses there and shooting blanks by now!
FF3 really leads the field on my computer. It clocks in at right at 0MB all the fucking time. Night, day, weekday, weekend. Always 0 fucking bytes.
Fuck FF3. CPU hogging bloatware. I'll stick with IE7 and Opera, thank you very much.
I can't be arsed to do this properly. There are a lot of graphs and stuff. But here are the text bits. Pure copy and paste. No formatting. Live with it.
Web browser performance is an often talked-about and flaunted thing, but many claims are not really backed up by solid evidence. I wrote software that collected millions of data points over 14 hours of actual browsing time, and this article reveals my findings.
Problem
Many people load hundreds of web pages, sometimes at the same time, often over periods of 3+ hours. Users complain about the memory usage of Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer, and we need a way to identify which browsers are better at managing memory than others. Traditional benchmarks do not look at all the things you might do with a program, and we need real-world numbers over a period of hours.
Solution
I developed a Windows Forms application in .NET called Memory Watcher that "watches" the system memory numbers. It uses a timer to poll the processes every 3 seconds. It then records every number and also prints them out in a grid on the screen. This allows us to keep track of each program's memory usage over time and with real-world usage.
Memory Profiles
These results are from opening Memory Watcher and then using the browser between 9,000 and 11,000 seconds (close to 3 hours). Each browser is tested in a separate session, and there are brief periods of inactivity throughout the time period. The vertical axis is the memory used in MB, and the horizontal axis contains the memory "checkpoints" my program took (one every 3 seconds).
(Graphs and more graphs)
Benchmark Details
The above profiles are not a direct comparison in any way, but they offer a visualization of trending in the memory behavior of the layout engines and interfaces. This is not a diagnosis or bug report. Let me show some important metrics of the above results.
Browser name Exact version Time active (s)
Hours Comments
Safari 3.1.2 10,470 s
2.91 hours Normal browsing
Firefox 3.0 9,681 s
2.69 hours Normal browsing
No extensions
Flock 1.2.2 10,146 s
2.82 hours Flock is based on Firefox 2.0
No extensions other than the default
Opera 9.5 9,855 s
2.74 hours No extensions
Only browser was used
IE 8.0 10,236 s
2.84 hours Used 7.0 rendering mode
No extensions
The system is Windows Vista SP1, and the computer has 3.0+ GB of RAM. No plugins are disabled, but the Acrobat Reader and Java plugins were (presumably) not used. Flock is based on Firefox 2.0 but its memory usage is probably worse because it uses built-in extensions.
* Just regular stuff
* These aren't stress tests, and I probably never went over 4 windows in each browser, with at most 3 tabs in each window. I didn't look at many pages that are extremely heavy on images, and no "browser benchmark" style pages. Gmail was used on each browser.
* Not just pages
It is hard for a regular benchmark to "simulate" a user actually clicking on things. Interactions with the user can greatly influence memory or performance. Having a responsive browser is probably more important than just having a "fast" one at showing pages.
* Plugins included
My profiles include Flash and possibly other plugins. A browser might have memory issues with a plugin and that could cause a significant problem with the user experience. (Most Windows Vista crashes have been due to graphics cards, not Vista itself, for example.)
* Real-life usage
An automation script will never give the same insight into performance over time as will this sort of profile. As developers, we want to make programs that work wel
"I wrote software that collected millions of data points over 14 hours of actual browsing time, and this article reveals my findings."
"It uses a timer to poll the processes every 3 seconds."
14*3600/3=16800 which is still much lower than million. To reach million he would have to test each browser for more than a month.
I've been blessed with using a Duron 950Mhz with a gig of RAM, lately. Quite speedy. Heh. But I've used worse, as many can no doubt also say. Oh, and an GeForce4, and of course the X Window System. :-)
I've always used Firefox, and Netscape before that, on my linux desktops. I must say that I tried Opera lately, for the first time, and found its rendering to be very spry. The difference was most noticable for me when loading very large web pages, or very detailed with lots of tables and such. The latter was our nagios service detail page, which the rendering in Opera was quite noticeable in its quickness.
So I get to be torn now, maybe, speed vs lean...
I do like speed. Opera's memory use doesn't seem to be so excessively bad as to negate the optimizations they seem to have coded into the rendering.
Aaron
While it's admirable that it's the leanest of the bunch, if I have 2GB of memory and over half of that is unused at the moment, do I really care if my browser uses 25MB instead of 40MB? I would think the speed with which the browser (and subsequent windows) opened, as well as how quickly it loaded plug-ins and other embedded media, would be of more importance.
Not really. Many Opera users are finding 9.50 to not be as good as claimed or hoped and finding it to be a memory hog. I am not alone in looking at 9.50, finding the the 9.51 snapshot to be less buggy, and sticking with 9.27 for normal non-browser testing browsing.
Now, maybe when Opera 9.52 or so is out, there might be some valid concern.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
My wife and I share a computer. She uses mostly uses Firefox, I mostly use Opera. This is on a 64-bit Ubuntu Hardy.
I have noticed no difference in her memory usage since we upgraded to FF3. I used to regularly have to kill her browser every once in a while (maybe once or twice a week) because it was eating up all the RAM. Since we upgraded to FF3, I can see no difference in memory usage.
For example, right now FF is using 300MB resident, Opera is using 100MB. Flashblock is installed on both browsers. Granted, that's not a terribly good test considering we've been browsing to different sites, but I've found that those numbers are fairly stable. FF usually levels off in the 300-500MB range, and Opera in the 100-150 range.
YMMV.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Link to to them. Who are you?
That's pretty much irrelevant to me, I switched back to Opera because of performance issues.
Memory != performance.
For example, when I open a new tab in opera the CPU doesn't register almost any change, when I open a tab in Firefox it goes almost to 100% (that's in Linux, with many extensions added, and BTW, I need those extensions to duplicate Opera's features)
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Good thing you have all these other accounts that can root for you. How many now? twelve? I'll have to check the sockpuppet log soon.
> Vista's low uptime is Vista's alone
Browsers and memory. You've told us about that before.
Are you seriously claiming that this is a problem with Vista? In all seriousness?
I really wish it would stop crashing every 15 minutes.
1's and 0's should be free.
In the case of Firefox, memory usage has ranged from 25MB to $MEMORY_AVAILABLE. Which sucks no matter how much you have.
i believe general participant to reader ration around the net is around 5 - 10%. if 100 users use a service, 5 posts on it and such.
Read radical news here
I have the same experiences, but in a much lesser degree. What really ticks me off about ff3 which made me stop using it is its annoying warning when you close it while having multiple tabs open. What used to be a warning which could be overcome by pressing enter (or escape to abort closing down) has now been changed with a new default save option to save the current state before exiting.
But when you hit that (by pressing enter) you'll end up with the whole mess next time you fire up ff3. And there is no way to stop this, apart from turning off the entire warning. Also telling ff3 to always start up with displaying the homepage doesn't work; the moment you save the state it'll display all the pages next time you fire it up. My other gripe is the new toolbar which makes it impossible to easily clean out the search history. But thats just a minor annoyance for me.
All in all this is enough for me to stick with ff2 for the time being. At least until someone (or myself) has some sort of addon available to bring the old warning without saving window back.
It doesn't take a degree in physics to cogitate that this would eventually catch up to you, twitter.
And yes, you have failed. The problem is that you'll probably just create more accounts. But eventually those will catch up with you. The dishonesty you've shown in the past few months by shilling your own comments and pretending that people are interested in what you have to say (and let's no forget how many of your self-farmed mod points you used on all your accounts and against others) is just unbelievable.
I think I speak for most honest Slashdotters when I say "good riddance".
What extensions are you using? I haven't crashed even once yet, and I'm running it full time at home & at work.
If you check this fairly lengthy explanation of how memory usage was improved in FF3 you'll see that it is mostly attributed to reduced fragmentation and leaks, and smarting caching, just as you are advocating.
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
After all, we've been able to plug in a decent garbage collector into sloppily written C programs for 15+ years now ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
His name is Jason Evans
This insistence on trying to create a correlation between Microsoft and your problems on Slashdot are probably one of the reasons all but one of your eleven accounts are now posting at negative karma.
Your problem is that you continue to blame vague conspiracies by evil corporation$ instead of understanding that people find what you do here distasteful.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
K-Meleon. I'd love to see how it compares to FF, though it would be best to wait for it to be updated on same Gecko renderer as FF3 uses.
Some, but I'm not one of them, my Opera (9.51 on XP SP3) has been running for a few days now (almost 4), with a peak of 157MB, currently at 96MB, VM of 114MB, and an I/O of almost 12GB's... opening up every site on my SpeedDial (9 sites + this one) brought me up to 122MB, VM of 140MB...
But, I honestly don't care how much it uses, because so far it hasn't impacted (noticeably) on any other software, and always starts (launches, or maximizes) instantly, and I prefer Opera's interface. And how much memory it uses isn't enough to make me prefer one browser over another... CPU usage on the other hand, might, but most of them are pretty much the same in that regard.
And after closing all those tabs, its down to 92MB, VM 110MB, peak the same.
http://dotnetperls.com.nyud.net/Content/Browser-Memory.aspx
http://xkcd.com/378/
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
You mean Debian. Or Debian Lenny. No need to use "GNU/Linux" at all.
And laugh all you want, but your characterization of this as an "uptime" issue is incorrect to say the least.
But aren't Opera fans always upset over something ?
They're either berating the world for failing to adhere to the published standards, or bashing the competition for being too trendy.
Opera exists to sell product, which is their Achilles' heel. They're trying to charge money ofr something everyone else gives away for free, and with the latest browsers they're running out of legitimate advantages to boast.
Microsoft doesn't care, and the Firefox team doesn't care either; all they need to worry about is implementing the features people want, to increase market share. Opera doesn't have that luxury.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Safari feels snappier...
/.
Sorry, might be an inside joke in Mac user forums, but I think there is enough crossover on
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
But it will likely be as bad as their Acrobat reader plugin is on Windows. The only times I have crashed Firefox 2 have been caused by Adobe plugins leaking memory and causing an out-of-memory error. The Acrobat plugin is especially bad since it doesn't close even when there are no PDFs open, and continues to use a lot of memory.
I can't link to them due to a non-disclosure agreement.
I work for a high profile interactive ad agency. The websites I work on are for brands and companies we would all instantly recognize. My company would rightly have my head if I started bragging about them on slashdot.
I guess as there really is no way to prove my identity, especially as an AC, but I know for a fact that a reasonable IIS server can run a high traffic website. I also know that it is possible to code a website that can't handle more than 20 users in any language on any server.
Even if Firefox 3 used ZERO memory, I'll still never use it because of the trainwreck that is the poorly-named Awesomebar.
Some things are more important than resource conservation, such as not screwing the user by needlessly taking away functionality and telling them "you'll get over it".
I'd gladly have Firefox 3 with the same footprint as Firefox 2 if that's the price to pay for keeping the old address bar autocomplete functionality in the code.
I'd like to see this same test measured over performance (mem over load time) - that would tell us something interesting. The working set numbers are somewhat arbitrary, that is the allocation scheme they may have been "optimized" by the dev team in some way. The fact Safari isn't capping it's own usable makes me want to see why that is.
/LabMonkey09
' They're trying to charge money ofr something everyone else gives away for free, and with the latest browsers they're running out of legitimate advantages to boast."
Please change that template, it is 2008 already.
I don't even know of anyone who actively develops with director, especially with what flash 9 can do. Hell, they (adobe) have been so lazy that they haven't compiled a version of shockwave to work under the new Mach-O (ppc 32-bit/x86 32-bit) for Mac OS X; the available one is still ppc only.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Opera's browser has been free on desktop for ages.
They also have a free mini browser for phones.
The only place they are "selling" their browser is for phones and devices. Given that that market is the one they are probably having the most success in it's hard to see it as their 'Achilles heel'.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Opera has its memory cache configurable via the UI. The default is "Automatic", and depends on how much RAM you have installed. So at least Opera may have given a "worse" result here simply from trying to use available RAM, RAM not used for anything else. And not really that it *needs* it.
You can set the memory cache to just be 10 MB in Opera if you wish, would've been more interesting to see how well that setting reflects reality than this, that most likely depends on his amount of RAM.
Meanwhile, other browsers may not use that strategy, so these results could well be quite skewed.
They need to test this on several systems with varying amounts of free RAM at the very least.
Only in situations when free RAM is constrained are these results of interest, anyway. Otherwise the user won't notice much. Free RAM is fast RAM, only when it has to go swap to the drive, it becomes a problem.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
... on my Ubuntu Hardy box when watching flash videos.
Can someone please tell me why leveling off at 120MB of RAM usage on a 3+ GB RAM machine that (presumably) isn't running anything else is a good thing?? That means lots of cached data is being lost for no real reason. If I had 3 gigs in my machine, I'd expect it to have my last 50 or so visited pages cached for when I inevitably go back to them, it's instantaneous. What's the point of having all that RAM if it just sits idle? You paid for it, so get the most out of it!
If he was running on a 512MB machine, that would make far more sense to keep memory usage at 120, but resources are there to be used man! You can't "save up" RAM.
I can't remember things any better before or after FF3, so I don't get what the big deal is.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
After moving to 9.50 it frequently freezes when opening new tabs, and seems pretty sluggish in places. The pop ups are pretty good and the address bar.
No wonder it uses less memory.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Well, your OS allocates that memory. In the case of Windows, if you hit 40 MB once, it very well may leave that much dedicated to FF, even if it's only using 25 MB internally. So, you have dedicated, unused RAM.
I think on Linux, how fast it will put allocated and unused RAM back to the pool will depend on the vfs_cache_pressure, but I'm not sure about that, as that reclaims inodes from cache to make room for the buffers. VM management always confused me.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
This definitely jives with using FF3 at work vs. IE7. I remember the first time I used IE7 I opened 7 tabs, browsed a bit, and it crashed. Now I only use it to test my site. On Linux however, FF3 is a slow pain in the ass. It seems like Mozilla isn't even bothering to test it on Linux... And by Linux I mean Ubuntu, which I'd almost expect to be their target.
My usage pattern is having browser open for months at a time, with 20-30 tabs regulary, sometimes more. I use opera, since no other browser is capable of something like this. But it looks like ff3 could be up to the task.
It could be argued that a good design would use the available excess resources to give the best user experience and only get clever with memory usage when the resources get constrained. If look at things that way, then Safari might be the winner and FF the worst.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
No wonder the server died.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Not sure if it's a memory hog, but it performs a whole lot better than the prior version of Opera I have on my home WinXP laptop - even if Firefox 3.0 is way faster than that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I F*CKING hate it, I just installed FF3 today and it's coming right off. No reason it's not optional
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
Firefox running on an AMD processor uses "2200+" Mb of memory, which actually means about 100 Mb in an Intel processor
I read a comment the other day here, and it hits home again. When talking about functionality, Extenstions are the best thing since sliced bread. But when talking stability, speed, memory usage, etc, extenstions are excluded from the test. He did this test with zero extensions. Would the result have been the same with the extensions installed that the average slashdot user uses? Maybe the winner was Opera when FF3 is loaded up with the extensions to match the performance. FF2 with zero extensions is already worse than Opera, and extension-less FF2 loses horribly in a comparison of features and capabilities. Where would FF3 fall if it were laden with extensions you use?
Learn to love Alaska
NetworkMirror.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The issue isn't "how much RAM do I use" but rather "how much RAM am I going to hog if another program needs it." My browser could use all ~2 gigs of RAM on my computer for all I care as long as it releases it whenever something else requests in. In this respect I find Opera is far and away the best choice, although to be fair I haven't tried Firefox 3 yet.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
Look at this article talking about memory usage in Firefox 3 by mozilla dev Parlov. There is a graph there that suggests Firefox 2 uses around 80Mbytes more memory than Firefox 3 over time.
Amazing how many people still haven't realized that this is not true. (Or just repeat it to defend their beloved browser of choice, and at the same time badmouth Opera). Opera hasn't required money since 2000. From 2000 to 2005 they had an ad-supported version, where you could pay to get rid of the ad, but after that, it's been free, as in beer. Still not free as in free speech, so I guess that will be the new argument against Opera, when the masses realize that it no longer requires money.
Shut up, twitter.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Are there still memory leaks in the skinning system?
Memory that is being shared between processes (e.g. through the use of libraries) is actually counted towards the RSS so something that is sharing a lot of pieces with another process may appear artificially high.
> Oh man, someone modded the above "Troll"
"freenix" and "ibane" are the same person. This is just an attempt to shill and game the moderation system, as usual.
Why the fuck should we care that you hate twitter?
When u bust a CAP or a capLET in PC-Illin's digital ass...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
What's sad is that the more Twitter posts, the more sympathy I have for Vista. (although I've never used it)
This space up for sale.
They may have the Windows version memory under control, but the OSX (Leopard) version of FF 3.0 is still a PIG. Just starting up FF with 6 tabs (1 is Slashdot) and the memory usage is over 160Mb and virtual memory used is over 900Mb.
And did they have to make the OSX skin so darn ugly?
Yawn, twitter stop talking to yourself, infact just stop talking.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
because nobody likes you twitter, thats why! also you simply dont understand that uptime of vista is completely irelivant
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
willyhill is a twitter account, you're giving him mod points morons.
What's sad is that an asshole changes your opinion rather then looking at the OS yourself.
And how Operas $60M income from selling their browser as a product different to Mozilla's $60M income from their deals with Google?
I'll give you a hint: Mozilla exists to sell product too. Their product is default search for about half the internet.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
Linux automatically uses all free memory for disk cache, and is very efficient at it. Instead of hogging memory that could be used by other process, Firefox could exclusively rely on a disk cache and rely on Linux' native and performant disk-cache to handle the in-memory caching of those files.
The best part of this is, if some other process needs the memory, Linux will simply free some memory from the cache, but the files will still be ready on the disk and the over application will still be performing well. Whereas if a 120Meg space is enforced a in-RAM cache, when memory becomes scarce, the system is at risk of paging out piece of the software (pages of code itself instead of pages holding cache) and thus make the whole system less responsive. The GC is just for JavaScript (required by design) and for DOM nodes which end up being circularly referenced (which is unavoidable). You would only need to keep the DOM nodes of the current page. Past pages are freed and don't (usually) keep DOM objects alive. Finally, 120MB is not a lot of RAM. Well, it depends. Notice that Linux is also very often used on kiosk with limited features and on old hardware which may not have huge amounts of resources.
Being able to run within a small memory space is critical for linux. Otherways, there won't be any difference with Vista.
Also a lot of problems are comming from bad Add-ons or even half-assed Browser Plugins. Flash is such a pain in the ass that can momentanily freeze the whole browser session.
Disclaimer : I run Firefox on Linux with in-memory cache disabled and using Gnash plugins instead of Flash (runs in separate process and can have autostart disabled). Adblock+ and Noscript also help avoiding that my browser loads tons of useless shit. And until recently my main desktop was a Pentium-III with 440BX chipset (a machine on which 1GiB of RAM is a rare occurence), but I didn't get any major problem even on recent distros. (Vista on the other hand had to wait)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
They're comparing FF3 to a beta version IE? (not like it all isn't 'beta' anyhow) Why wouldn't they use IE 7 in the comparison?
I have Opera 9.5 running for 14 hours, checking both IMAP and POP mail accounts totalling tens of thounsands of mails and RSS posts, some 20 RSS feeds, various downloads during the day and it's consuming 111 megabytes (working set size given by Process Explorer) in Windows XP.
Look how shitty Safari did there, looks like memory leaks there, big time.
Nyah Nyah Nyah!
he should rerun exactly the same click stream to compare things properly. I suggest using selenium
...what it would be like if Apple came up with a benchmark for web browsers? They'd do some kind of splashy announcement. Geeks would question its relevance in the real world. Soon they'd do some new tests and proclaim that the competition now performs better on those same tests anyway. Eventually, the rabid Apple phanbois will claim that the next release will bury the competition.
Apple. So predictable.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Firefox 3.0 great until it goes into let's eat 98% of you CPU mode - even with all addons turned off, and even just while browing my usual sites - may work well for a while then bang 98% CPU. Also closing firefox sometime seems to leave the firefox process alive that needs to be killed via task manager before you can restart.
I second that. We need a "-1 Nobody cares that you hate twitter" mod.
http://www.mhall119.com
Funny because i currently use ubuntu hardy, which has sprung a pretty nasty memory leak in the NetworkManager, but it doesn't affect my uptime.
anyway mr not twitter, how come you know so much about where twitter does/doesn't work? I mean I now have reason to belive he works at MS and is a disgruntled ms-sql coder, but you were months ahead of the game with that comment.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
This old 33 mhz 386 cpu just ain't what it is used to be it spikes to 100% when I do just about anything.
Got Code?
Successful troll is successful.
because the Internets are Serious Business.
In fact, I think this was not really an experiment at all; there was no formality in setting and regulating variables and controls. This was "real-world", using the author's actual pattern of browsing - an anecdote with pretty graphs. It has some value, but the article makes itself sound more scientific than it deserves.
That said, there's still other evidence that Firefox 3 uses the least memory out of these browsers (i.e. the tests where "people load hundreds of web pages, sometimes at the same time" as mentioned in TFA). For example, here's one with Fx2, Fx3, and IE7.
I disagree with the test results. Also opera has configurable memory cap...waht gives? My opera 9.5 has all sorts of extensions, mail, rss feeds, notes, book marks and 8 tabs open. 161 kb. I have never seen my opera browser above 200. The test fails to inform us if the system used a vanillia installation of vista sp1. Other programs such as anti-virus, even when not directly loaded in the browser, generally load through user32.dll to hook the user interface of popular browsers. So which services and programs installed on the machine would have an impact on broswer preformance due to what the OS modules import. A better analysis on memory footprint would take module walking and threads into consideration.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
While it is slightly diffferent:
I was an academic researcher working for a large engineering firm where the top level work is classified and they don't want anyone connecting the dots with what you are publishing and the work they are actually trying to do. So while I was free to publish my research, I was not allowed to attached the name of the Company to any of the papers.
from the linked Real Snail Mail blog:
Each snail is equipped with a small glass capsule attached to its shell. The capsule contains a tiny chip and coil antenna that can be activated by a reader at a range of 3 cm.
Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere... and I thought I saw a two.
Is it ok if I say what clients I work for and lend the company's name to my ideas?
Uh. No.
I can tell people who I work for on Facebook or at a party. I can talk about what clients I work for and what I do at a party and maybe vaguely on facebook.
I definately can not talk about the specifics of my work including what websites I did on a public website like slashdot. It is clearly unprofessional and may disclose things that the my company or their clients do not want disclosed or discussed publicly.
My company's logo is not found anywhere on our client's websites. Yeah, you can google your way to figuring out that my company did certain websites thanks to industry publications and press releases but you will never see me publicly connect the dots in a situation like this.
Wow, finally I found someone here in /. that understands how the AMD marketroids calculate their numbers...
There are at least four sacred cows here: AMD, Apple, Java, and Ruby, that no one can criticize, lest they lose mod points. That's why I always criticize them. Got karma to spare, so let's make those dumbasses to waste their modpoints, right? Otherwise, they might downmod some really important post...
that unused resources are wasted resources? If Safari has enough RAM to cache everything, why shouldn't it? Now, run the same test with 512MB RAM and see if memory consumption does the same thing.
That's really what I want to know - not how much it uses, but how willing the browser is to give it back when other processes need it. That'd be useful.
People confuse "using less memory" or "using a fixed amount of memory" with making good use of memory, but those are completely different things.
How is not using freely available memory "an advantage"? If the RAM is just sitting there, not being used by any other process, I bloody well expect my browser to use it (cache more pages, preload the next links, etc.).
Plus it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. Opera, for example, has a built-in e-mail client (with full message indexing), a built-in bittorrent client, and so on.
And let's not forget that Opera can run on just about any cellphone or PDA, and Firefox cannot. So much for a "smaller memory footprint".
Some OSS projects spend far too much time trying to come up with "comparisons" that make them look better than the competition and not enough time actually mking their product better. Some bugs in FF3 have been there since version 0.9.
Acid3 test scores:
Firefox 3: 71/100
Safari 4 dev preview: 100/100
RAM usage, standards compliance, open source; all of these are variables we have to consider. Test scores as mentioned above are meaningless unless taken in view of the entire experience provided by a browser.
Some of us prefer to eschew the mainstream, some embrace it.
Pick your poison and encourage our freedom of choice, but do not pretend that what works for you is the right choice for all.
By going to about:config and editing browser.cache.memory.capacity you can increase the size of the browser's memory cache.
Doing so on a system with plenty of ram gives a big speed boost with lots of tabs or navigating back and forwards a lot.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Here's FF3 with 10 tabs open and 3 windows, a few with flash video. Haven't closed if for ~6 days, have had as many as 5 windows open, as many as, say, 30 tabs at once in that time frame. Looks pretty good to me.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
20331 user 20 0 569m 224m 19m S 13 11.1 8285:26 firefox
Vast improvement over 6-9 months ago when it used to hit 1200MB after a few days.
three hours is not relevant. they should have run that program on my 3-weeks old firefox ....
the major combat operations against memory leaks are over.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Since browsers represent their data as tree structures.... each DOM element is represented by a pointer to a class, every string and token is represented by a pointer to a string (most often a class, but is some browsers, not always), ecmascript objects are very very pointer heavy especially given their bindings into the document model. CSS is a lot of strings and it's a lot of properties which are all pointer based.
So, when you double the length of the pointer from 4 bytes to 8, well guess what....
Ironically you can easily get IE6 to start browser windows in a separate process (more a unix style thing than windows ;)), so if browser instance starts to leak memory, you can close it, and the other browser instances will still be OK. Similarly when one browser instance crashes, the others stay up.
You could not do that with Firefox 2 (too hard - have to run with different directory/user etc), and it's "all or nothing" so if something goes wrong and it starts to use up 1GB of RAM, you have to close the entire browser to free up memory. Just because of one problem window, you have to close ALL of them (which is very annoying). When there's a crash - with FF2 all browser windows go away.
Is FF3 like that as well? Seems like it does free up some memory when you close tabs, that's good. But I bet there'll be some poorly written popular extension and you'd have the same problem all over again.
I prefer the browser windows to be in a separate process. I doubt FF3 will be that good that this sort of thing won't come in handy.
The measurement and the results are not convincing. "Just regular stuff" and "Real-life usage" is not a measure! If you want to compare the memory usage you need open the same predefined web pages in the same order in every browser. Without this the results are not verifiable by anyone. Nevertheless, on a PC with 3GB RAM I m not sure that lower memory usage of firefox 3.0 is an advantage. I would be much happier if my software can effectively use the available free memory as not too use it at all. On 3GB configuration Safari 3.1 is my winner :D
On Linux, memory usage seems not so bright: http://www.mininglabs.com/2008/06/16/firefox-3-an-empirical-performance-study/
The author developed a program to snapshot memory usage per process every 3 seconds on Windows.
Could have used perfmon.
This is a crap result, I been using Firefox 3 daily and it seems to be taking too much memory and CPU usage. I need to kill everyday morning. IE is better . I havent tried safari yet but prefer to try opera
I don't think I've ever gotten Safari to run at 600MB of ram. I do however rather frequently get FF2/FF3 to use up over 500MB of ram.
That said I still use FF3 far more than Safari as I like it far more for other reasons.
Also... 14 hours? I run my browsers for weeks at a time with 30+ tabs open without shutting them down as do many people I know. A longer test would have meant much more to me.
Answered here.
Give me a break, when's the last time you met a Firefox user who doesn't use a half-dozen extensions, some of which provide functionality native to Opera and Safari ?
This is about as close to "real world" as the show on MTV.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
The text claims the tests have been done without any extensions. From what I have read so far (I don't use FF, only opera) Firefox without extensions is maybe nice, but definitely not 'wow' - so I'd expect almost everyone to use (some/many) extensions.
And they call it a 'real-world test'?
If it means anything to anyone, ive had FF3 open for at least a week now and its at 140mb.
Hah, he obviously didn't try leaving it open for a couple of days... I've already seen FF3 use nearly 1GB of memory...
Maybe Adobe will actually make a Linux/FF Shockwave plugin (Yeah yeah, I know, fat chance)...
Yeah right and maybe they'll release a Firefox/Linux PDF plugin as well.It would be a lot easier to compare the performance of these systems if, you know, they all used the same scale for the y-axis. Even better, if you could put them all into the same graph... although it might get too busy.
Great and all, but the same day I found Opera 9.50, there was a security advisory for Opera 6-9.27 I believe.
Sometimes you have to deal with memory hogs to get security updates.
This does make FireFox 3 look very good, however I have a few problems with the methodology. I do not know how any browser other than Opera caches data, for example in Opera even if you close a tab, it still retains the full history associated with that single tab if you decide you need it again, this memory would only be reclaimed if the browser's recycle bin is cleared. Secondly, in Opera when you go back a page most pages are still cached so a reload is not necessary, on this one I do not know if FireFox 3 offers the same feature or not.
The history of closed tabs along seems enought to make Opera look worse, when in fact it is simply because it is caching much more data than any of the other browsers
Very much looking forward to similar tests running on Mac OSX. Webkit -vs- Firefox3 -vs- Opera -vs- Safari, etc... So far FF3 on the Mac has been A
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
Although the measurement of casual browsing is less scientific than conducting a 'casual browsing' session, scripting it, then testing all browsers on exactly the same activity, I think it's still notable that Firefox 3's ~120MB memory usage was reached within ~148 seconds. The only other browser to ever reach what I would call an equilibrium state was Flock, and it took ~1300s. That indicates to me that regardless of whether or not the browsers all suffered the same load Firefox 3 is better at dealing with the load it was given. Observing that the author mentioned nothing about system or browser lock-up, and making the reasonable assumption that neither occurred, I conclude that for a wide range of system load, this test strongly suggests that Firefox 3 is the best of those tested at judging the load put on it, allocating the correct level of memory usage, and then sticking to it. I suppose this also implicitly assumes that the load even within one test is consistent, which also isn't quantified in the description of the 'benchmark.' Still, the author did put constraints on the number of browser windows and the number of tabs in each, so fairly stable load seems *likely*, and so I'm still inclined to think that reaching an equilibrium level of memory usage, and reaching it more quickly, are both indicative of good memory allocation and de-allocation.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Although not useless it is like throwing a softball to firefox 3 for the most part. Throw in Flock 2.0 and then I will be satisfied. I have Flock 2.0 FF3 and safari (I am a mactard har har har) and when I updated both Flock and FF and I actually deleted my addons, Flock came out with a smaller memory load than FF and is much "zippier". I would like to see this redone with Flock2 on windows.
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking
"These are real-world tests and not contrived benchmarks." Oh, really? You cannot evaluate the memory efficiency of a piece of software without knowing what it's doing with the memory it uses. Just because a program uses less memory doesn't mean it's more efficient. In the case of a Web browser, you might actually want it to use *more* memory, to improve the performance of its cache.
I've found Opera 9.50 to be quite a bit faster than the 9.2x versions, and it also seems to be less of a CPU hog. Memory usage seems to be about the same. Overall, I consider it a worthwhile upgrade, though the new tab button on the right side of the tab toolbar is taking some getting used to.
... do you mean uncontrolled and therefore meaningless?
What, did he browse a bunch of sites, switch browsers, and browse a bunch more? Maybe visit youtube.com with one, and then some Amiga sites with Firefox? Oh, I get it.. he visited "just regular stuff." Well, we know his benchmarks are reliable and useful then don't we? Cause look, he has pretty graphs.
Gimme a break.
On closing it crashes at random websites. Go to ebay a lot of users are complaining it broke the site. :Buy It Now" tab is gone I know that for sure. Seems to me all Mozilla cared about was breaking some damn download record.
I used some of the RC versions and none crash on me until I got the final.
Memory on the OSX Firefox is tougher to release because OS X doesn't do anything with the madvise/msync syscalls used on free up memory on some other platforms (see Measuring Memory Use). OSX memory usage should apparently level off at a peak though.
What the hell are you guys on about?
You might say I'm a heavy browser user.
With all those sockpuppets, of course you are one hell of a heavy browser user.
AC because I modded this thread.