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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."
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.
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.
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.
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]
In the early days, more RAM meant that you could cache some frequently used information in memory instead of recomputing it or loading it on demand. But there's a diminishing return. Nowadays, it's usually faster to recompute than read it all back from RAM, and if an interactive program uses a lot of RAM, then it's likely keeping a lot of junk in memory that it doesn't need. That tells you that the programmers didn't think things through carefully, and they probably didn't optimize other things that matter either.
Too bad it won't stop all the "what memory problem?" trolls.
Remember how 3.0 was touted to solve all the memory problems? I still get 1.5gb of usage *regularly* on multiple platforms with 3.0.11 without any installed extensions after a few hours. In fact, I'm on Firefox 3.0.11 on OSX 10.5.7 right now and it's at 1.3gb. You can tell when it's being a memory hog again, because videos won't play without stopping and stuttering and pages take longer to load and switching tabs feels glacial.
So, considering 3.0 originally was supposed to solve everything, I think I'll not hold my breath on 3.5. Especially for a problem that continues to happen across platforms.
This just shows that when more Windows users (or convenience-first users) move to linux, the added security wont help. Users will continue to do everything the way that is most convenient to them, and that is gonna bring more attack vectors aswell. The neverending "linux is just more secure OS" only affects those who know what they're doing, but that way it works in Windows aswell (I dont run av/fw, and I've never had any problems [checked some times really deeply from filemonitors and packet sniffing], but on the hand I know what I'm doing and what not to do).
And no, you cant teach them security. Normal users aren't that interested in it, so they wont learn.
That's simply not true on modern computers. The CPU is often idle - it's starved for data, with the bottleneck being the buss that feeds it (RAM, generally). Add to this the fact that reading neighboring areas of DRAM is a much faster than randomly reading spots in in memory spread across whole megabytes (or gigabytes, even).
Compare recomputing something, where you never have to leave L1 cache, versus flushing the first few cache levels continuously to do spread-out reads of already-computed data. It's very likely, on a modern CPU, that the first will be faster.
Of course, this will vary considerably based on what your actual problem is, and you may be getting into bad "must hand-write assembly" cases which should generally be avoided, but... it is still true that computing every time is not only smaller, it's faster some of the time. For evidence of this, check how some people are finding compiling with -Os instead of -O2 actually produces faster code. In any case... trying to stuff a 1GB working set through the Von Neumann bottleneck is never going to produce an efficient and responsive program. Firefox is not exception here, though it's getting better with each release.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.