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Memory Usage of Chrome, Firefox 3.5, et al.
An anonymous reader writes "This experiment graphs the memory usage of Chrome and Firefox 3.5 (along with Safari and Opera) over a series of 150 Web page loads using an automated script. Firefox 3.5 shows the lowest memory usage in all categories, including average memory usage, maximum memory usage, and final memory usage. Chrome uses over 1 GB of memory due to its process architecture. Safari 4 and Opera show memory usage degradation over time, while Chrome and Firefox 3.5 are more reliable in freeing memory to the OS." IE 8 was not included "because the author could not find a way to prevent it from opening a new window on each invocation of the command."
I couldn't find a way to keep it from sucking so forcefully all the air was evacuated from my office every time it was run.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Finally, this should stop perennial "firefox is a memory hog" trolls. Hopefully.
Unless you are talking about a system with severely limited memory, memory usage is probably not the right criteria for deciding which browser to use.
Something like "it doesn't show weird ass icons and bars when Slashdot decides to change CSS" is probably much more important. Firefox 3 totally screws up Slashdot in Default mode.
We all know that the thing that hogs the most memory in Firefox is all the extensions that people use to immitate other browsers... Who actually uses Firefox without a single extension and brags about how good it is anyway?
I use Firefox and Safari regularly. I use two web browsers because each one does something vastly better than the other. Firefox for porn and online transactions, Safari for basic day-to-day anything that might include bookmark management (long story short, every browser I've used EXCEPT safari still does bookmark management using some variant of the horrific Netscape method - this includes IE, Mozilla, Firefox, etc - whereas Safari is the first browser I've used that does it in a non-bullshit fashion). However, useable as it is for bookmarks, Safari's a dick when it comes to password management and a few other things - most notably, how the browser handles while the system is paging out or otherwise shot in the ass with RAM overuse from other applications.
Long story short, under ANY kind of system load - we're talking ANYTHING above IDLE - Firefox is more responsive than Safari. When the system is shitting gold plated bricks trying to deal with the demands After Effects or Photoshop or Final Cut Pro is putting on it, Safari is beyond useless... and Firefox is responsive.
It all boils down to memory usage. Specifically, Swap/pagefile useage. On the Mac, firefox seems to be more responsive under load while safari is LESS responsive under the same conditions - it has ultimately has nothing to do with RAM usage and everything to do with how the respective applications use swap/pagefile.
Eat as much ram as you like... but until Apple does something about disk I/O, stay the HELL away from swap - or I'll use the application that does. (namely, Firefox.)
... and is the difference between Firefox, Opera and Safari basically how efficient they are at freeing memory that's no longer used?
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
Summing the memory usage of all the Chrome processes is probably not the correct thing to do, as the memory usage indicated most likely includes shared libraries. I can't say this for sure about Vista, but on all sane operating systems, each shared library is loaded only once into memory, and then shared among different running programs.
Opera Unite! To help free the Iranian strangle hold on information!! ;-)
Then a few years later we end up wondering how come our software now sucks ten times more ram than before despite no corresponding quantum leap in functionality.
You test all the browsers except the most up-to-date version of the most popular one. In other words, the one that matters the most.
I'm also not sure why ram is something that is worried about anymore. I don't find it important that firefox only uses 300mb or so of my 4GB. With RAM at an all time low and most modern computers having at least 2GB is just not worth worrying about as much as it has been in the past. Basically, I would rather have faster software that takes advantage of the memory that I use, then slower software that avoids using it. This metric would matter to me. To each their own, I suppose, but I see this as meaningless for most users.
IIRC its possible to instruct Chrome to not use its process-per-tab model via a command line option. Can't remember what it is, but I remember reading it existed. It seems likely that Chrome would have used less memory when running in that mode.
I'm glad to hear that Firefox has finally improved its memory usage. Although my system has plenty of memory, I still find that the amount of memory FF3 requires causes a very annoying slowdown.
Of late, I've been using Midori as an alternative. With it's current git version and a recent WebKit build (r44951), I've found it to perform better than any other browser I've used (opera, konqueror, firefox). Although it does have a few minor kinks, it supports pretty much every site I've come across and works considerably better with mozilla plugins (namely, flash) than Konqueror and Opera.
Currently with an instance I've been using for the last few days, Midori is using 77 MBs of memory (for comparison, my other running browsers: opera- 120 MBs, Konqueror- 91 MBs, Firefox- 119 MBs). I didn't do any even moderately sophisticated benchmarks suck as those in the article, but that beats the average and final amounts of memory of FF3.5 as shown in the article. Obviously this is not Windows-friendly, but I'd say Midori deserves some more attention, considering that (for me, at least) it outperforms all the other major browsers.
Is the Linux version of Firefox particularly horrid or something? When using more than 10 tabs or so, my memory usage is typically in the 600mb+ range. It's currently taking 1.1g resident for about 40 tabs. I'm on x86-64, but even if we assume there's a full doubling of RAM usage due to the architecture, that's still 550mb equivalent, which his test never hits even with 150 tabs.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There's no answer that's always right. If memory usage was paramount, we'd all have browsers that used 1 MB of RAM and took 10 minutes to render a page, with another 2 minutes to scroll down a page.
But RAM is cheap and developers have to make compromises based on the real-world that they have to compete in. I can get a gig of RAM for about the cost of a burger lunch with my wife.
Do I really care about memory usage? Only to the extent that it's 'good enough' on my slowest computer - a dual-core Mac Mini with 512MB.
FF3 is plenty good enough for me to thoroughly enjoy an episode of 'Burn Notice' on Hulu just now on that very computer.
Sorry you are having probs with memory usage on your (ancient?) computer. Perhaps you should consider forgoing a burger lunch this week?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
"In memory of Chrome" was how I first skimmed it
Table-ized A.I.
The author says he didn't included IE 8 because there was no way to start it without opening a new window for every invocation!
I would have preferred to have it included despite this "big drawback" and have this thing explained in a note.
A partially meaningful test (upper limit?) is always better than no test at all!
I fear that this omission is to "protect" bad performances even in comparison of a browser by a company which seems to be in deep competition with Microsoft.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I live in tabs hell. I have... uncountable numbers of tabs open right now--over 9,000, probabaly. My Firefox memory usage can easily push 1400mb. When that happens I kill it and reload, and the memory resets at around 400-600mb.
Seeing this graph, I can only imagine what Chrome would do to me.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
To all who bash Firefox, make sure you are using newest 3.5 and not some previous version.
It seams to me that lots of people haven't even recognized a small difference in number, but it is a big milestone for Firefox internally.
Hey Vageta, YHBT.
I am sure that this is true for all of the browsers, but in Opera's case...
The machine has 4GB in question and Opera is set to "automatic" for the memory cache (default). According to this article, this instructs Opera to use up to ~10% of the system memory. This is quite tunable based on the environment, so one could easily optimize for a low-end machine and have satasfactory performance. The browser using the memory effectively is the more interesting test, which this benchmark fails to determine. An interesting detail in the graphs is how sharp the memory reclaim cycles are, where the smoother indicates better memory management. The graphs indicate that Opera does a good job in this regard.
I wish people would learn the difference between "et al" and "etc".
You are correct, summing is not the right thing to do, because the Chrome processes all share a lot of memory. I'm running a Chrome derivate at the moment, SRWare Iron, which uses generally a few tens of MB. So long as you don't use Flash it doesn't tend to reach the 100 MB mark and it runs blazingly fast on my computer (10 years old) where Firefox slows to the point of being unusable and IE8 is probably not even an option. Also, according to Process Explorer, if you consider its working set, Iron is a lot more memory friendly than other browsers, which probably explains why it isn't swapping even though I only have about 400 MB RAM total. But don't take your information from inane mathematically challenged internet articles, or this post for that matter. Why not simply try the browsers yourself and see which one works best for you?
You test all the browsers except the most up-to-date version of the most popular one. In other words, the one that matters the most.
Benchmarks are for people who choose software. Only a small minority choose IE. In a way, IE8 was included. It failed to compete due to lack of necessary features.
Wow, I *wish* I could get Firefox 3.5 to use so little memory! As I write this Firefox is using 1821M VIRT, 944M RES...and I only have 23 tabs open! Firefox memory usage has always been abysmal for me. Does Firefox perform drastically differently on Linux than on Windows? I would be quite horrified if it actually performed better on Windows, but I don't understand how it possibly managed to be so low...I've never seen Firefox use less than .5G with even a few tabs open for a while... I realize my personal experience involves extensions, plugins and other things which suck of RAM, it still seems terribly high for me. If I leave it running for several days, it will peak 2G and I have to restart the browser.
It's great that in the future Firefox might be better, but here and now, the latest stable version is 3.0.11, and while Firefox has many redeeming qualities, speed, memory usage and general performance is not one of them.
Interesting to see that Opera is not the memory sipping, lightweight browser that it's proponents make it out to be.
I just added another 4G of RAM to my new Fedora 11 x86_64 workstation because the 4G that I started with wasn't enough to keep it from bogging to a slow crawl today (after running mostly Firefox for less than a week).
And I haven't even installed the 64-bit Flash plugin yet!
this test is meaningless in assessing chrome. totaling all memory for each individual chrome process does not indicate how much memory they use in aggregate. much of the program code and data is shared between processes and thus over counted.
If you're running a 64-bit version of Windows (Vista x64, etc), then give serious thought to running a 64-bit build of Firefox.
I've found this build to not only be noticably faster, but also infinitely more stable and less of a memory hog.
In terms of numbers, I've had only one crash in the last 8 months, and at the moment, it's using 159MB with 15 tabs open. I've never seen the official 32-bit build perform like that...
I would like to see the CPU usage of different browsers tested. I run Firefox 3.5b and Safari 4 on OS X 10.5, and with JUST ONE TAB open with gmail loaded, firefox uses 8% of the CPU sustained with bursts for some reason to 40%, and safari uses 1%.
With my usual workload, with like 40 tabs open among 5 or 6 windows, Firefox uses 40%, safari 4%. This is ridiculous! This means a lot when you're on a portable on battery, not to mention general system responsiveness.
I would like to see the CPU usage of browsers compared.
IE 8 was not included "because the author could not find a way to prevent it from opening a new window on each invocation of the command."
Did the author try Tools -> Internet Options -> Tabs -> Settings and change the option from the default "Always open pop-ups in a new window"?
on linux you can have many different processes that each think that they own memory, but in reality the OS uses the same ram for all of them
in the case of chrome where it is forking from the same core process repeatedly, this will have a _very_ significant effect on the real memory requirements.
however, it's impossible to tell this from userspace, you have to ask the kernel for information to track this down
I would really like to see this benchmark repeated with half and double of RAM available.
In these environments, memory allocation is an extremely important capacity planning criterion for application deployment.
\\ would love a Firefox addon or web proxy for remote desktop environments that dynamically rewrites the header of flash movies to allow globally reducing the playback frame rate to something arbitrary (like 2fps), as it would much more user-friendly than blocking flash altogether. I would site-license 1000 copies of that sucka tomorrow...
I'd love to see the memory management for Chrome, FF3.5, Safari 4 and Opera 10 when Snow Leopard arrives. Then I'd love to see how they compare to Windows 7 and see where work needs to be improved on both platforms.
By the end of the month, the most populair version is actually Firefox 3.0.x (IF Mozilla doesn't release 3.5), IE7 has a smaller market share, so does IE6 or IE8. It would actually have been really interresting to be able to compare 3.5 and 3.0 in the same test.
New things are always on the horizon
What the hell is up with Slashdot's CSS? I keep seeing images all over the comments (the bars used on the new comments section, the relationship icons). Is anyone else seeing them. I'm using Firefox 3.5.
Regards
elFarto
http://blog.codefront.net/2008/09/10/optimize-firefoxs-memory-usage-by-tweaking-session-preferences/
Check that link out guys - I did the caching tweaks, and it sped things up some, so I went back and used all the tweaks.
Let's remember that FF3.5 is still a beta. We should probably send feedback if we aren't happy.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Downloading the Internet?
IE 8 was not included "because the author could not find a way to prevent it from opening a new window on each invocation of the command."
Really? So the "Open links from other programs in" and then choosing either a new tab in the same window or the same tab doesn't exist then? Oh that's right, it does - right under Tools, Internet Options, Tabs.
So either the author is fucking useless or he's lying as he knows the result shows IE winning.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
In a way, IE8 was included. It failed to compete due to lack of necessary features.
I'm sorry but like the author, you're talking out your fucking arse. The bit you need you'll find in Tools, Internet Options, Tabs where near the bottom you're given the option of how to open links from other programs.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Actually it does perform better on Windows, and looks better, and is better able to use the system and system settings without obscure magic (this is a Ubuntu/Xubuntu rather than Linux issue I believe), and is better able to load pictures (once again it might be a Ubuntu/Xubuntu issue but this one is more likely to be a general Linux issue).
Yes the combined Firefox & Xubuntu problems I've been having the last year is slowly driving me back to Windows. I thought w2k would be my last MS OS but I'm beginning to wonder about getting Windows 7 if I buy a new machine... even though I'm a F/OSS advocate, supporter, and donor.
I'm simply getting fed up with the amount of time spent on Google to figure weird stuff out (which of course includes filtering out the 99% of inapplicable suggestions that solve other obscure issues).
And after every goddamn new release too, can't they just leave working stuff alone?
Note to all the Ubuntu variations: only copying the OpenBSD release cycle without copying other parts of the OpenBSD approach to the system (no, not talking about security) leaves your users stranded up Shit Creek.
Opera usually doesn't go over 300 megs over days, but Firefox often goes to 1 giga in a matter of 2-3 days. Even if I close all tabs, it still hogs to this 1 giga. So I have to restert it, since I've got 2 gigs only.
Weird thing is that I use Firefox only for its firebug and debugging of intranet software (I'm developer), while Opera is for the rest - I've got very weak intel graphic card, so Firefox doesn't work very well.
But Opera isn't perfect either, when Firefox gets to it 1 gigs memory, Opera usually gets to its CPU eating process... not really sure why, but it just keeps my 2 cores at 100% until I restart it. I think it was the same for Opera 9.
I haven't tested FF3.5 for it yet, but if its fixed, then I'm gonna be happier :)
I used to run 100s of tabs at a time (up to 300 at one point) on a 1gb RAM machine. This is proof of how bad my browsing habits are but also shows that the only browser capable of this right now is Opera.
Try it in Firefox and your PC will definitely grind to a halt. If you need extensions, use Firefox.
Efficient, Extensible, Correct
Pick two
Firefox - Extensible & Correct
Opera - Correct, Efficient
There is not the development community in Opera, despite supporting widgets.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
The author forgot that Opera has a "closed windows" buffer that keeps some info to do the reopening of closed sites faster, what inevitably consumes memory. Wether the user really wants this or not is another subject,
Nobody knows. It's surely is Cowboy's mumbo-yumbo magic to confuse unworthy.
ah browser wars.
its funny how no matter what u say:
- chrome lovers will find a way to say what it does is done best and its the best in the world
- safari lovers will find a way to say what it does is done best and its the best in the world
- opera lovers will find a way to say what it does is done best and its the best in the world
- firefox lovers will find a way to say what it does is done best and its the best in the world
"opera has debug code and its so slow" = rofl. 1: its compared against other "debug" releases and 2: so called "debug" code rarely makes any difference, beside exe file size.
"firefox sux when ive 100 shit extensions so dont say it doesnt use little memory u fucking troll" yeah right. you're dumb.
"1.2GB is nothing in my 16GB workstation". yeah right. you're dumb as well
could go on forever
Safari is crap.
I've seen some here say that memory usage is not important unless you have a old computer. What if you run a lot of processes like I do. I have my IDE open, Firefox, Pidgin, Winamp or Rhytmbox, Several explorer or nautilus windows, subversion server, TortoiseSVN explorer extension(when on windows) etc. And I only have 512 MiB of memory. If I wanted to buy some more memory for my computer I'd probably have to decide between paying for memory(DDR400, which costs about twice as much as DDR2, even though it's older) or not paying for my internet connection(that would make the ISP very unhappy and me ending up on court getting sewed for not paying). I'm a student, don't have a job, and yeah, money is important, as well as memory is. Just because memory is 'cheap' these days is no excuse for writting a bloated memory hogging program. The browser is not the only thing that is running on peoples computers.
All the sexy babes want me... to fix their PC.
Those idiots who make blogs with 300 images 400 youtube links that are 600 pages high are idiots.
But they sure push FF to the limit.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You can get all the memory you need for the cost of a video game. cheap asses
I feel the same way about CPUs. We're always seeing comparisons of the latest rivals. But personally, just sometimes, I'd like to comparisons of new versions versus old versions - whether that is latest releases of browsers or the Phenom IIs vs. old Athlon dual cores. I want to see progress because without that context it's hard to judge actual value. If we see that Firefox 3.5 is better than IE8, that's good to know. But what if they're both vastly superior to Firefox 3.0. Or that there really isn't much difference.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I just like Firefox. It works the way I like. Guess I've never considered memory leaks and all that. And, I don't even own a Firefox t-shirt.
"Chrome uses over 1 Gb of memory due to its process architecture."
More likely shared memory is counted more than once due to the process architecture.
http://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/google-chrome-memory-usage-good-and-bad.html
Instead of relying on Windows to tell you the memory used, you can use the built-in about:memory page.
...I don't.
I have five machines ranging from 4 to 12 GB. I also don't keep applications open long enough for "degradation" to play a role; closing an app gives the OS a chance to play memory organizer just as surely as rebooting a machine (sorry *nix fanboys who brag about all of your oh-so-important 'uptime' when rebooting takes, at worst, a few minutes) gives it a fresh pallette.
I don't CARE about memory usage. Just isn't on my radar, anywhere.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
Yes. I see them too. They arrived right after they fixed the white-on-white comment titles.
You can work around the issue in the same way as with the previous bug: click the "Change" button on top of the comments.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
I got 12GB... so who cares? :D oh wait, I use Opera. :]
I was wondering if Chrome was using a lot of memory, simply because there was a lot of free memory to use.
This seems like a nice way to develop applications to me ... gobble up a stack of resources so that you can perform really quickly ... however, also know how to operate (at reduced speed) with reduced memory.
I haven't used Chrome on any platform yet, so I cannot speak for it.
Firefox has usually been around 100 Mb for me on XP, which I consider bloated, but I'm aware that resource efficiency isn't important to many of the rest of you, these days. It seems to average at about half that on FreeBSD, but is still the most memory-intensive application I use on a daily basis. Still, for GUI web browsing, I can't complain, so I'm not.
I'm not passionately in love with Firefox, but I don't hate it either; it serves its' purpose and I am content with it. It does what I need, doesn't crash unless there's a problem with a page, and does its' job in a relatively efficient manner. I suspect that my lack of feeling toward it either way is actually due to its' transparency; it stays out of the way to the point where I barely notice it at all, and lets me focus on web content instead, so people would probably tell me that that is a good reason to actively love it.
I would not, however, like to go back to using Firefox without Vimperator at this point. I have heard even one Vim enthusiast express dislike for Vimperator, but I actually consider it probably the single most meaningful user interface upgrade that I have found since Ratpoison; the two complement each other exceptionally well.
leaving any browser open all day long makes my weezy thinkpad x22 essentially freeze after some 16 hours, even if i'm barely using the box (it's durational more than usage based). however unlike what the author experienced chrome causes the least issues and opera the most for me, with firefox right behind opera.
it's a problem since opera is my favorite browser and the stripped down x22 my favorite laptop. luckily it only happens at the end of these long stretches. if i reboot after eight ours it's fine. simply using any browser no matter how intensively for just a few hours is not enough for any memory leakage to become apparent with my setup.
- js.
Ran the same FF and Opera browser setup, and Opera beats the pants off of FF. Don't forget, FF has the worst of the Javascript performance both speed wise and the fact memory usage shoots above Opera and Chrome.
I don't quite understand everyone's aversion to applications using memory. I mean--I'd much rather my applications take the time to use the memory I have, with all 4.5GB/sec of performance on sustained reads than my hard drive which is roughly about 3% of that speed on good parts of the drive structure with RAID0.
Application performance should never be about how much ram it uses, but how it uses it. I'm all for applications being efficient, but if it wants a bunch of ram to make things a bit faster--by all means, I've got 8G in my system, have at it.
This is one of the primary reasons I like Superfetch in Windows Vista/7--because it utilizes ram for application and data prefetching. What better way to use the ram than have the most frequently used programs and information cached and readily available at super high speeds?
I wish some of my applications used more ram (see: WoW) just to improve visible performance (I'd rather have a higher upfront load time than the loading/performance drops mid-game).
My experience of Firefox is over the course use for a week it becomes the biggest resource consumer on my machine and needs to be periodically shutdown (closing it can take nearly 10 minutes watching on Windows XP as it releases the excess of memory that it has accumulated). That isn't I admit with 3.5.
Point is that test really is not representative of the real daily usage I see. People around me have the browser open with lots and lots of tabs for days on end.
I've observed Chrome, Arora, KMeleon, Firefox in use on Windows (mainly a LInux user mind you) and find KMeleon the smallest resource user. The only trouble with that as a browser is javascript, every so often it just stops responding because of scripts.
Memory use of FF I find pretty much the same on Linux too.
I see it too. Real professional that they make these insufficiently-tested (or untested) changes on the live site instead of a test box.
It's merely an annoyance, but still.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Our five-year old laptops typically run XP with 512MB. They're obsolete, yes, but a lot of smaller companies are like mine, and have to squeeze nickels, and in this economic climate, we're not getting new hardware or even new RAM in the next year. Running IE8 is deadly on these machines.
Wouldn't it be great if there were a way to make security convenient? Is there anything out there that monitors the type of action being taken and only prompts for credentials when the action looks suspicious? I know that if I authenticate on my linux boxes I won't be asked for my password again if I do something else in a short period of time. It's smart enough to know that if I just typed in my password 10 seconds ago, there's no need to do it again. (Which is a potential hole if there was a program running as the user that monitor requests for passwords and then executed the "bad" code immediately afterwards.)
If there were a way for the OS to monitor my actions and know that if I go to Add/Remove Programs and try to install something, I don't need to be asked for my password. But if the install is automatic from a script or web pages, then prompt.
AV programs use heuristics to determine things that might be viruses, could the os learn or take an intelligent guess (erring on the side of security) as to whether or not an action is really initiated by the user?
After all, if I initiate something, I'm just going to put my password in anyway. No reason to prompt.
The fix is to set your User-Agent to IE6; might also need to add "&beta_index=0" to the URL to make it stick.
only that the peaks are at 100% memory instead of 200 M, and the vertical lines are when it crashes and I have to restart it. And no, it's not fixed in 3.5.
It does this in Safari 4 as well.
I was able to get rid of this by going to by Slashdot account preferences and selecting "Classic index" under Layout.
it seems to me that memory usage is far less important that CPU usage. I mean if you spike out that processor, then your computer is at a fucking standstill. RAM is cheap, easy to upgrade, and can also be paged out to your hard drive. it is like putting a RAM upgrade in a Celeron. Yes it will *kinda* help with multitasking, but it will still be slow because the processor is holding it back. Chrome still has all of them beat in my eyes as far as speed is concerned.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Yes, you did used to be able to do everything you described in 256MB of RAM. But to attribute the biggest increases in web browser memory usage to programmer laziness is to ignore a drastic change in the way we (and by we, I mean the general internet-using public) use web browsers. It's no longer enough to display static web pages. Web applications are mainstream, JavaScript and Flash are practically inescapable.
I was curious, so I just checked memory usage of a web browser (Firefox 3) and an office app (Word 2007). Total memory usage, with four tabs open to fairly intensive sites (slashdot, ars technica, gmail, facebook) and a 10-page document open in Word? 150MB. I do almost all of my web browsing and general computing on a computer with a 1.8GHz Celeron processor and 1GB of RAM. The P4 system you described should be doing just fine.
That's pathetic.
This is my sig.
"My experience of Firefox is over the course use for a week it becomes the biggest resource consumer on my machine and needs to be periodically shutdown"
You actually ran XP for a whole week without rebooting ?
Reducing memory usage - Firefox
27.8Mb here...
You should see another process floating out there. There's a root chrome process and another for the tab. Either that I have a zombie.
This is my sig.
Safari 4 and Opera show memory usage degradation over time, while Chrome and Firefox 3.5 are more reliable in freeing memory to the OS."
Freeing memory to the OS?
I do not need more memory for OS. My OS takes only few hundred kilobytes memory. Problem is that all other software on the system takes all the else. Gnome alone takes over 150MB! If Firefox can save few megabytes or more, it does not help the OS. The OS is always loaded to RAM. It is the first software to be loaded to RAM and it executes everything else, so what does normal process memory usage help it?
Ok, 50 megs then. But most of that memory is probably shared,so I'd guess its actually quite a bit less.
you don't have a wife!
The point is that the single metric of this test, though in a way useful, is not the best way to measure performance.
There's a difficult position: that more is better, on the back of the free work of others.
Maybe the point should be whether this test measured the most useful value given the amount of effort invested in the test, or whether they should have bothered at all, if this was the most they could manage.
From a cost/benefit perspective, I think there's enough value in what was accomplished *despite* these uncertainties. That said, if they could have managed to repeat this test run after yanking out a 2GB memory stick, that would be extremely informative as to how these browsers respond in a reduced memory circumstance, and how much of their memory use under large memory conditions was speculative.
Just last week my commit charge on my XP system at work was in 4GB territory with 3GB of RAM installed. I had ten FF windows scattered over nine desktops. Four of the desktops had Eclipse workspaces open, plus sundry office junk, but none of my big memory hogs, such as R, running large jobs. I don't think memory consumption is a non-factor yet, for small values of yet.
Let's back up for a moment and look at the big picture. I remember, all too vividly, back in the mid 1990s when one of the all-time favourite MS bashing memes was "no matter how large you make the hard drive, the next version of Microsoft 95/98/NT and Office would immediately expand to fill it up." In the minds of many teenage fanboys, the primary virtue of Linux was that it would run well on a 500MB hand-me-down disk drive.
The fact of the matter is the many of those early versions of Windows were highly compressed and curtailed, at great effort, to run well at all. As hard drive capacities increased (along a completely predictable trend line) Microsoft stopped bothering with the suitcase packing tricks, and allowed the software to expand to its natural size, somewhere between 4 and 10 GB. Shock, horror!
In the minds of many fanboys, software bloat makes an appearance on the end-of-civilization top-ten list. For about a year, which didn't stop a lot of people from posting on web discussion pages a very tired meme for years afterwards, as badly dated as rotary phones and bell-bottom pants. Sadly, I had to conclude that MS bashing causes brain rot.
Back to the present. Browser memory consumption is going to follow the same inclined hockey stick. Even with a migration toward Google apps.
Fast forward two years from now, as the economy comes out of the tank, and large build-out of corporate desktops with an 8 GB standard memory install, this discussion will be as quaint as wondering whether the upcoming Windows 2000 will install successfully on a 40GB hard drive.
Earlier this month I priced a 12GB memory kit for a Core i7 system at USD$180 street (name brand). At 12GB, making the jump to a 64-bit OS is a no-brainer, as you're way past the pointer-size penalty.
A much bigger factor in browser performance is how well these browsers exploit the available cores.
For the netbook segment, it boils down to power efficiency: you don't really want to fire up eight cores to render compressed images every time the user presses the page down key, so the major impact of good memory caching will show up less in response time and more in power consumption.
(Footnote concerning FF on multiple desktops. I absolutely *love* the FF FireTitle add-on. Press CTRL-; and it prompts you for a Window name, which becomes visible at the front of the process tab. The downside is that session saver doesn't capture the assigned window names so every time Adobe snafus FF, I have to assign all my window names over again. Nor does my session saver remember my window assignments under my multidesk client. Nor does Adobe remember its own session data, which is utterly incredible considering how often Adobe *deliberately* requires a restart to install patches. What I would give for a Chrome PDF viewer to smarten these guys up.)
I recently noticed from my simple memory-usage indicator in the Vista taskbar, that FF 3.5 beta hardly ever increased in size when I opened a new tab.
Yet Chrome started gobbling up memmory right 'n left when I opened new tabs.
I hadn't gotten around to measuring Safari or IE8 yet, but I do know that I am sticking with FF 3.5 at present, as I only have one gig of mem with my Vista system.
And I might add, it works quite WELL, you /. linux weenies! (unless I start using Chrome, which seems to slow down Googling, and even GMAIL!)
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- aqk
F U
Related:
How about functionality for IE/FF that showed the resource usage of each extension?
How about a way to show resource usage of objects in the browser, so you can see just how much memory/CPU a particular Flash application/annoying ad is devouring?
How about a way to disable extensions (and free up their associated memory) that you absolutely NEED, but are giant bloated pigs - without restarting the browser? Include objects of all sorts (images, applets, etc.) as well - select object, open context menu "remove current Object" - but AFTER it's been running, rather than before it loads like with Flashblock.
Nah, they haven't. It is the corporate bean counters, CEOs, and boards of directors who have no loyalty to Abrash's Zen of Assembly Language; coding for cycles and bytes takes time.
The whole point of making code modular and dependent upon pre-existing "frameworks" - plug'n'play, if you will - was to dispose of those expensive programmers who could craft code in favor of those who could generate code.
Don't need good, tight code, when you can generate bloatware offshore, release it, and then throw hundreds of programmers at bugs post-release and still turn a helluva profit.
And the bean counters and the folks who get paid in stock options and so forth don't give a damn what box the public is running; witness Vista, the computer retailer's friend.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
And don't forget the mouse gestures!
I'm mousing left handed. It's really a boon to not have to use both hands (or switch hands) to move between tabs, close tabs, open links in new tabs.
*sigh* You know you have issues when mouse gesture software improves your sex life :(
Try this: load a simple html file (no javascript) in ff, open several tabs and load the simple html file in each tab. I am guess that will not crash ff.
For me, it's javascript that kills ff. I am guessing that certain ff just can not handle certain javascript operations. For me, hitting the wrong kind of javascript is like stepping on land-mine, cpu usage is peaked at 100% and I have to kill ff.
[disclaimer: I work for google on chrome]
First off, Firefox is definitely great at keeping memory usage low - better than Chrome. Some on this thread say that firefox has memory leaks and bugs. I don't know about that, I find Firefox is pretty solid. Nonetheless - one advantage Chrome has is that tabs are in separate processes. So, as you close tabs you get to completely flush out all memory from that process. This adds a level of resiliency to chrome you can't match in single process browsers.
Second - thanks to dotnetperls for posting their methodology and their exact test source code! The only question I have is "which memory metric was used?" There is a big difference between "working set private", "working set total", "private bytes", etc.
What is the right metric to use? I use the same metric Vista uses: private working set. You might argue "why not use private bytes"? I agree this seems like a good metric, and it's not a bad one. But, it doesn't reflect user experience.
Why? Because the working set is the amount of memory *not available to other apps*. If other apps can have the memory, then using the bytes is inconsequential. Private bytes does reflect bytes allocated by the process at some point, but the OS is not using physical RAM for those pages right now.
For most applications, there isn't much difference between "private bytes" and "working set private bytes". However, because of Chrome's multi-proc architecture, there is a big difference. The reason is because Chrome intentionally gives memory back to the OS. For instance, on my current instance of Chrome, I'm using 16 tabs. The sum of the private bytes is 514408. The sum of the private working set bytes is 275040, nearly half of the private bytes number. This is on a machine with 8GB of RAM, so there is plenty of memory to go around. But if some other app wants the memory, Chrome gave it back to the OS and will suffer the page faults to get it back. Since Chrome has given it back to the OS (and has volunteered to take the performance consequences of getting it back), I don't think it should be counted as Chrome usage. Others may disagree. But Windows uses working set as the primary metric for all applications the OS folks agree that working set is the right way to account for memory usage.
Single process browsers have a hard time giving memory back, because they can't differentiate which pages are accounted to unused, background tabs and which pages are accounted to the active, in-use tabs.
One last note: If you have a version of chromium, you can run it using --single-process. I ran the dotnetperls test in this mode, and then Chrome and Firefox are pretty close in memory usage. Firefox still wins. But most of this memory use is due to the explicit tradeoff to use multiple processes rather than use minimalist memory.
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