Memory Usage of Chrome, Firefox 3.5, et al.

Posted by kdawson on Saturday June 20, 2009 @05:21PM from the gig-here-gig-there-pretty-soon-it-starts-to-add-up dept.

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."

1 of 505 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Finally... by smoker2 · 2009-06-20 22:34 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

mount -t tmpfs -o 'size=100M' tmpfs /path/to/chosen/mountpoint

Create an about:config preference called browser.cache.disk.parent_directory with a string value of /path/to/chosen/mountpoint .

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.