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."

Comments

If slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Except on Linux

[DrYak]

It would be a stupid design to leave lots of RAM free, and reload stuff over the net. Well, it depends on your OS.
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)