Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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'
Lools IIS can't hold its own
Haha! That's funny and insightful!
Oh, wait.
The term "slashdotted" has become ubiquitous with smashing a webserver due to high traffic.
Most webservers are *nix based (though admittedly IIS is gaining ground).
Hm. Nevermind.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Yeah, there are 2 of you. It's your fucking flash plugin d00ds.......
(why would anybody install that piece of crap is beyond me)
My Firefox never crashes, I repeat never. (Ubuntu 8.04) I use it for hours and hours every single day.
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.
This is most likely related to the Flash plugin. The second suspect would be the Java plugin. For me Firefox never crashed on a website without Flash and Java, but I had a few crashes due to Flash bugs.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
It would have been interesting to include the Flock 2.0 beta, which is based on Firefox 3, and IE 7. I don't think many people are using IE8 yet.
I'd also throw in a minimalist browser like KrazyBrowser for fun.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
So wait... 120MB is considered a reasonable amount of memory for Firefox to take up, an improvement even? Do any other "commonly used" programs soak up that much... because going by what I'm running, that is way out ahead of the field.
I love me some Firefox, wouldn't want to switch to anything else, but memory usage is still something I'd file under "to be resolved". Not that it matters that much - I have plenty of RAM to throw at it, but it'd be nice for it to not eat up a large chunk like that.
Setting a cap on memory usage isn't a good solution, IMHO -- using well-designed memory handling that proactively frees memory seems to me to be a far better solution than a cap and garbage collection model.
Well, it may seem to you, but it isn't.
What you call a "cap" is an in-memory cache. If you "proactively free memory", you get rid of stuff in the cache, and then, well, it's not cached anymore.
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.
Should it ever crash though? If a plugin makes a browser crash, I blame the browser. I switched to Opera because Firefox was crashing every 20 mins or so when watching Flash videos.
Yup, just like those. I'm not disputing the claims that FF3 uses less memory (been using it since alpha 3). I just do a lot of software testing at work, and I thought I'd bring out my inner pedant in relation to this supposed "test".
I, personally, wish flash development under Linux was remotely on par with the Windows offering. This has been one of the things holding the "old folks" in my family and down the street from running something nice on their PC like Ubuntu instead of Windows. An amazing number of them have Bongo premium accounts (and the like) and after setting one person up, then having to nuke Ubuntu for Windows because 90% of their flash-based games would no longer work, made me think something more needs to be done in this area instead of just ignoring it. Sadly, it's closed source and the open source options don't suit their needs. It's unfortunate, as if this one hitch were removed, I could think of five people I could get running Linux by next week. As it stands, I'm still waiting indefinitely to save them from Vista.
I'm not a coder, I'm an electronics/hardware/telco/admin/networking guy so I am pulling this out of my butt, but would it be worth investing in getting the Windows version of flash to run under Linux somehow?
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.
I am as disgusted by twitter as the nextI don't insist that every distro add GNU to their name; that's up to them. But Debian chooses to so at least in their case could we maybe lose the "RMS is teh zealot!!" jokes?
Debian is a great dsitro for promoting Free software and I am pretty sure they made the choice to keep GNU in the name on priniciple. I respect them for it and it's a major reason why Debian remains my distro of choice.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Why the fuck should we care that you hate twitter?
On my Fedora Core 7 system, with a 2.5ghz CPU, running "vmstat 1" causes the X server to use 5% CPU. (It is an nvidia graphics card, but I don't use their binary-only driver).
Typing in this firefox-2 text window gives a CPU usage of about 30%.
Opening a new tab causes 60% CPU utilization for 2 seconds.
I think it's time to give up on Linux on the desktop.
Vigorous mouse movement causes about 35% CPU utilization.
...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.
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.
Being able to run within a small memory space is critical for linux. Otherways, there won't be any difference with Vista.
No, actually, getting as much out of the RAM you've put in your machine as you're supposed to is just the icing on the cake. Having a web browser, photo editor, 3d modeler, and 3d MMORPG open at the same time was pretty cool. Pulling it off with one measly gig was frickin' sweet, but if it had taken a gig and a half, or even two gigs, I'd still be a long way from a Vista convert. (Has anyone sighted a Vista convert?)
There are a million reasons Linux will give you a cleaner, more efficient system. You did describe some of them very well, but let's not lose our heads here. Give me a machine for free with a terabyte of RAM and as many quad cores as you can squeeze in it, and I'll still want a platform I can tweak to my liking, one that doesn't constantly come up with ways to nag me, reach in my wallet, or imply I'm a criminal, and one that's just generally built to put me in the driver's seat of my own computer.
Finally modding someone offtopic when they rant about what "Begging the Question" means: priceless.