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Chrome is Using 10-13% More RAM to Fight Spectre (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes PCWorld:
The critical Meltdown and Spectre bugs baked deep into modern computer processors will have ramifications on the entire industry for years to come, and Chrome just became collateral damage. Google 67 enabled "Site Isolation" Spectre protection for most users, and the browser now uses 10 to 13 percent more RAM due to how the fix behaves.
"Site Isolation does cause Chrome to create more renderer processes, which comes with performance tradeoffs," Googleâ(TM)s Charlie Reis says. "On the plus side, each renderer process is smaller, shorter-lived, and has less contention internally, but there is about a 10-13% total memory overhead in real workloads due to the larger number of processes. Our team continues to work hard to optimize this behavior to keep Chrome both fast and secure." It's a significant performance hit, especially for a browser battling a reputation for being a memory hog, but a worthwhile one nonetheless.
Chrome's Spectre-blocking site isolation "is now enabled by default for 99 percent of Chrome users on all platforms."
"Site Isolation does cause Chrome to create more renderer processes, which comes with performance tradeoffs," Googleâ(TM)s Charlie Reis says. "On the plus side, each renderer process is smaller, shorter-lived, and has less contention internally, but there is about a 10-13% total memory overhead in real workloads due to the larger number of processes. Our team continues to work hard to optimize this behavior to keep Chrome both fast and secure." It's a significant performance hit, especially for a browser battling a reputation for being a memory hog, but a worthwhile one nonetheless.
Chrome's Spectre-blocking site isolation "is now enabled by default for 99 percent of Chrome users on all platforms."
Well, there is still competition as who will have their fixed CPUs first..
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Who cares if you're running 32+ GB of RAM. Sucks if you're stuck on that modern new Macbook that caps out at 16 GB...
A) That’s like responding to a car analogy with “who cares if you own a private jet”? Suggesting that people should have 32GB of RAM to run a browser is preposterous.
B) The new MacBook Pros are configurable up to 32GB of RAM...
Or using old computers like mine with 2 GB & 6 GB of RAM. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I don't expect CPU fixes to come until 3-5 years have passed. This requires a major redesign, it's not just a little fix.
No more slow CPU, no more extra RAM used, no more OS software to protect from CPU security flaws.
Pick any two. Which do you want?
Browsers should be using different processes for different websites anyway, as a general security measure, and I believe they have been aiming to do that already. Since Spectre only allows reading memory within the same process, I don't understand the panic here (though I guess it's different for virtual machines).
We've already had countless issues where developers didn't sanitize their inputs, so a malicious piece of data could do something nasty; crucially, we didn't need Spectre for that. Meltdown is a wholly different beast, but I guess Intel needs to keep up the Spectre panic for AMD.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.