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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."
Firefox is still my browser of choice, due to the plug-ins I use daily. I have to wonder how Flash intensive the sites loaded were.
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.)
I think you are full of shit.
On one of my machines, IE8 is slightly faster than FF. But on my old slow machine, IE8 is *much less* of a memory pig, so much so that I had to drop FF simply because after awhile with a few tabs open, it slowed my machine to a crawl and eventually required me to kill it in the Task Manager.
Some people have tried to tell me that I just don't know how to set FF up to run efficiently. I say that I shouldn't have to.
I'm not happy about this because *I am not* a "whatever works" guy, I very much want to support OSS and spacifically FF. But it just doesn't work for me. Right now. Yet.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Finally, this should stop perennial "firefox is a memory hog" trolls. Hopefully.
This really hasn't been my experience, and I am not trolling. My experience, which is to say what actually happens to me when I am surfing , is that after awhile with a few (2 or 3) tabs open, FF memory usage rises to the point where my machine crawls to a stop, and I have to kill FF with the task manager.
Why is my FF experience different than the average FF fanboy? Why this is, I don't know. I do know that I am unwilling to get "under the hood" and edit config files, because I don't think I should have to.
This is my experience as what I believe to be "average" use.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Seriously? I've never seen IE8 take up less memory than FF, ever, for any combination of pages. Right out of the box, FF is much lighter weight.
I can't imagine what you were doing wrong.
It matters a lot in thin client scenarios. You want as many users as possible on the same server. Importantly, you want idle sessions to be friendly to the system by releasing as much memory as possible.
Exactly. I think I've su'd once in the last month, and that was yesterday to mount a ram disk to use as the Firefox disk cache. That was a nice tip BTW, significant speedup in page loads and UI responsiveness.
/path/to/chosen/mountpoint
/path/to/chosen/mountpoint .
mount -t tmpfs -o 'size=100M' tmpfs
Create an about:config preference called browser.cache.disk.parent_directory with a string value of
You do need to restart the browser for it to take effect. I also chowned the ram disk to my user name so that FF can write to it. 100MB is probably a bit too big, but when I set it as 50MB it filled up. I'll tweak it later when I see what is usual for the cache. It's currently running at 47.47MB with 2 tabs, and I'm not anal about avoiding closing the browser if I'm not using it.
Interesting to see that Opera is not the memory sipping, lightweight browser that it's proponents make it out to be.
Opera has advanced memory caching. When you close a tab, it remains cached in RAM. If you decide to undo the operation and reopen it, nothing is usually reloaded from the disk cache or the network (Opera even keeps the tab history cached, so you can go back and forward with lightning speed on a reopened tab). Other browsers don't do anything like that, so when a tab is reopened, they reload the content (to put it differently, when a tab is closed in Fx/Safari/Chrome, it's gone from RAM, as can be seen from the sharp drops in the graph from TFA).
This just isn't a valid test because Opera works differently from everything else, which is why I love it; advanced caching is one of those things that make all other browsers "unusable" for an Opera user.