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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."
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
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.
If they didn't compare with Dillo/lynx, it's meaningless. Also, already slashdotted.
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
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'
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.
Tests need to be repeatable, and when they are repeated they need to provide consistent results. If you can't provide consistent results on each subsequent test, you need to provide solid rational on why the results were outside your margin of error. Saying "Oh, I might have had one or two youtube videos up at the time" is not solid rational.
Scripts that visit the exact same pages, for the exact same time, do the exact same things across all browsers provide consistent, quantifiable results. Since everyone's browsing behavior is different no script will ever provide "accurate" results for real world usage. But then again, those scripts could be closer to my real world usage than this guys anecdotal test. Get it?
I haven't had Firefox 3 crash for me yet (although I've only been using it since Download Day). I have noticed that it no longer gets hung up processing javascript the way Firefox 2 often did.
I like my beverages with warning labels!
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.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
In the case of Firefox, memory usage has ranged from 25MB to $MEMORY_AVAILABLE. Which sucks no matter how much you have.
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
<keynote style="Steve">
Safari on OS XI is going to be 400% faster. It's going to look 700% rounder, and integrate seamlessly with your ego. It will make you 1500% more smug, no matter how smug you were before.
Firefox ? Not smug.
IE8 ? *chuckles* next slide.
Opera ? They still have square corners, what does that tell you about their priorities ?
It's so awesome we had to give it a new name: Snow Safari.
(*applause*)
</keynote>
-Billco, Fnarg.com
' 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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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 ]
That sounds like all your rendering is being done on the CPU to me. Windows will do the same thing if you refuse to use Nvidia's binary only Windows driver.
That being said, I have similar problems on my laptop, where scrolling a window often will peg my CPU. In my case, I have an older Intel integrated chip, which does a lot of 3D rendering on the CPU. Since the advent of AIGLX, it makes some rendering on my laptop fairly slow. At least, I THINK that's what's going on there. It's never really bothered me enough to look into it in-depth.