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

Terrible reference

[toleraen]

Between:

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
.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".

Re:Terrible reference

[CyberLife]

This was my first question too. Real-world testing is all well and good, but how controlled was it? What assurances do we have that his results really paint the picture he claims and not something else?

Note: The site is down so I haven't read the article yet. I'm guessing it fails to address this concern?

How did they measure memory consumption?

[Idaho]

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.

Re:How did they measure memory consumption?

[jd]

I don't know about these guys, but since most of these will be dynamically linked files, I'd probably be looking for ways to trap the malloc library calls, in much the same way as most of the debug malloc implementations do for various Unixes. If you track the maximum usage and the unfreed total, you can determine the memory consumption and memory leakage without relying on any system-specific interpretation of what memory is.

Re:Lools IIS can't hold its own

[nmb3000]

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.

Memory?...what about speed?

[Last_Available_Usern]

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.

Re:Careful...

[Paul Neubauer]

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.

Re:Yah, but how reliable?

[Tweenk]

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.

Re:you do know what "contrived" means right?

[toleraen]

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".

Re:keep laughing

[just_another_sean]

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 next /. user but what's wrong with GNU/Linux? That's what Debian calls their distro.

I 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.

Re:Irrelevant...

[treat]

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.

Re:Does it still have the Awesomebar? It does?

[LargeMythicalReptile]

Parent is not informative.

Took me all of 10 seconds with google: "Firefox3 Awesomebar disable". And yet, that page is absolutely not what the GP was asking for.

To quote:

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.

gumpish--and I, and a lot of people as far as I can tell--want the "classic" (read: FF2) location bar behavior. There is currently no way to get that in FF3. There used to be an about:config setting for it in some of the betas, but they took it out and told those people who liked the old functionality to shut up and deal.

The about:config tweaks on the page you linked to will disable the location bar dropdown entirely (heck, it even says as much in the edit--did you even read the page you linked?).

A sibling post suggests the oldbar extension, but that only changes the appearance of the bar and not the behavior.

As I said, there is currently no way to get this functionality in FF3. The closest thing is this extension, but that's not perfect. Really, this bug needs to be fixed.

Can you imagine...

[Foerstner]

...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.