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Real-World Firefox 3 Memory Usage Leads the Field

Posted by kdawson on from the free-what-you-alloc dept.

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."

9 of 406 comments (clear)

  1. Wonder what Firefox 2 looked like ... by xmas2003 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Wonder what Firefox 2 looked like ... by reg · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That won't do those without 120 MB of memory to spare much good. 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.

      (-1, Uninformed)

      Firefox has no global cap on memory. It will dynamically configure it's caches (to some extent) based on the available RAM. It would be a stupid design to leave lots of RAM free, and reload stuff over the net. It also proactively frees memory, in most cases, although it sometimes delays a little, because it knows that you might turn around and reuse all of that memory you just stopped using. The GC is just for JavaScript (required by design) and for DOM nodes which end up being circularly referenced (which is unavoidable).

      Finally, 120MB is not a lot of RAM. Notice that the other browsers are using similar amounts of RAM.

      Regards
      -Jeremy

    2. Re:Wonder what Firefox 2 looked like ... by neokushan · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Perhaps in days gone by it would have been shocking for browsers to use so much memory, but the memory being used is directly related to the content on the sites it browse.
      We recently seen studies indicating that the average website has tripled in size in the last couple of years alone, imagine how much bigger websites have got in the last 10-15 years?
      More images, higher resolution/dpi ones at that, flash, plus there's all the scripting engines and other plugins that have accumulated as well.
      While I comlpetely agree that software bloat shouldn't be accepted (Nero, I'm looking at you) and if anything, programs should become MORE efficient with age (in an ideal world), I think browsers could be one exception since the content they're handling has got so much bigger.
      So really, the best way to indicate progress here is to pit the fully featured browsers against each other and see who comes out on top. Probably still wont be firefox, but I bet the big three still use a lot of RAM compared to what was the norm a few years ago.

      --
      +1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
  2. But what memory metric was taken? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:But what memory metric was taken? by Evanisincontrol · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Ok, I see your point. Let's pretend Browser X is using dirty tricks with Windows's memory management system to shrink down how much memory is allocated to it. Browser Y is not doing that and appears to be less efficient.

      Well and good, but it's irrelevant. The remains that Browser X is taking less memory from Windows's pool of resources. It doesn't matter how Browser X is doing it or how efficient Browser X being with the memory internally, it is a solid truth that Browser X is using occupying fewer system resources than Browser Y.

      It's really a moot point, because it's unlikely that the developers of Browser X knew any "cheats" that would let them use substantially less memory than every other browser out there.

  3. Great news FF - though Opera is speedy by SgtAaron · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  4. Re:If slashdotted by Koiu+Lpoi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Ffffffuck, is that a typo on Safari? That's stupendously huge! Is that because they have to load up some kind of ridiculous layer to make this mac-alike app run on windows? I know that iTunes uses a ton of ram too, but not six hundred megs huge.

  5. Re:Memory?...what about speed? by AbRASiON · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I couldn't agree more, I want an incredibly incredibly snappy browser, I don't care how much resources it requires.

    I have a theory and I'm convinced of this theory that cache in browsers simply has been broken, since the beggining
    I've used netscape, ie, ffox, netcaptor and god knows what else and no matter how big I set the cache or how regularly I hit sites, they still seem slow to load images and content.

    Perhaps it's the complexity of the pages has scaled up, I spose that is possible.
    I've gone from browsing on a Pentium 166mmx with 32mb over the years up to a quad core 3.2ghz machine with 4gb of ram and moved from 128k dsl / 512k dsl / 1.5mbit dsl / 8mbit dsl and 18mbit dsl.

    I am impatient, make no mistake but surely if we're just throwing images and text around, these damned things should be snappier?
    FFox 3 is definitely a move in the right direction, it's noticably faster than FFox 2 but I still find moving back / forward, clicking links and interaction in general should still be faster :/

  6. Re:Except on Linux by packman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I can't say that what you're saying is very 'informative', sorry. While linux indeed uses free memory to cache files, browsers do not cache 'files' in memory, they cache fully preprocessed DOM-trees and pre-rendered parts of webpages. Disabling in-memory caching only hurts performance there, forcing the browser to reprocess and revalidate all your pages. The only reason your browser uses the disk is because it's faster than your network connection and saves speed between browser-sessions or when visiting a page which has been cleaned up from your browser's own memory cache. Disk I/O - even with loads of OS-level caching will always be slower than letting the application just keep stuff in memory.

    Most of your browser's in-memory cache is pre-processed data, including the last X entries accessible with your back-button - and that for each tab - are cached. This means images, DOM-tree, CSS-styles and sometimes even pre-rendered parts of the page.

    I really hope you don't believe the disk io is the limit here. Parsing, validating and rendering takes up a good part of the responsiveness - even on modern PC's with fast quad-core cpu's. It's not only the CPU's that are advancing in speed, also webstandards require more & more processing power.

    Also with todays machines with 1GB+ RAM - I don't really see the problem of memory useage. I have 4GB at home - and the moment my linux uses even only 25% of that for disk caching, it will have very old stuff in that disk-cache of which a lot would probably never be used again. I'd rather have my browser use 2Gb and feel extremely snappy, than have it use less memory just to preserve memory.