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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
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'
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.
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.
<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
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 ]