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IE8 Beta 2 Fatter Than Firefox and XP
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Sep 02, 2008 10:11 AM
from the other-than-that-how-was-the-parade dept.
from the other-than-that-how-was-the-parade dept.
snydeq writes "Consuming twice as much RAM as Firefox and saturating the CPU with nearly six times as many execution threads, Microsoft's latest beta release of Internet Explorer 8 is in fact more demanding on your PC than Windows XP itself, research firm Devil Mountain Software found in performance tests. According to the firm, which operates a community-based testing network, IE8 Beta 2 consumed 380MB of RAM and spawned 171 concurrent threads during a multi-tab browsing test of popular Web destinations. InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy speculates that Microsoft may be designing IE8 for the multicore future. But until your machine sports four or eight discrete processing cores, IE8 will remain 'porcine,' Devil Mountain's Craig Barth says."
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Chrome Vs. IE 8 771 comments
snydeq writes "Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 herald a new, resource-intensive era in Web browsing, one sure to shift our conception of acceptable minimum system requirements, InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy concludes in his head-to-head comparison of the recently announced multi-process, tabbed browsers. Whereas single-process browsers such as Firefox aim for lean, efficient browsing experiences, Chrome and IE 8 are all about delivering a robust platform for reliably running multiple Web apps in a tabbed format in answer to the Web's evolving needs. To do this, Chrome takes a 'purist' approach, launching multiple, discrete processes to isolate and protect each tab's contents. IE 8, on the other hand, goes hybrid, creating multiple instances of the iexplore.exe process without specifically assigning each tab to its own instance. 'Google's purist approach will ultimately prove more robust,' Kennedy argues, 'but at a cost in terms of resource consumption.' At what cost? Kennedy's comparison found Chrome 'out-bloated' IE 8, consuming an average of 267MB vs. IE 8's 211MB. This, and recent indications that IE 8 itself consumes more resources than XP, surely announce a new, very demanding era in Web-centric computing."
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It's also _BETA_ (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate being turned into a Microsoft apologist on this one, but give them a break. IE8 is still beta. Comparing release quality software to beta quality software is simply unfair.
Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes I disagree, like when we're talking about features.
Here? Yes, you're right. Beta software is often compiled with less optimization and extra debugging information. I was using VMWare Server 2 beta, and it ran painfully slow, well under the speed of Server 1. Because it was a beta.
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Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed, complaining about performance at this stage in IE8's development is unfair.
However, if we don't complain, they won't put as much effort into tuning its' performance.
That said, it's slow and that's okay for now, but when it's released... *shakes fist threateningly at Microsoft* (even though I use Firefox).
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Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:5, Interesting)
While what you say is true to an extent, I still don't understand the use of 171 threads - especially on an operating system that has "spotty" lotsa thread handling performance at best (when compared to... well, anything else).
Optimizing the code will probably increase performance and decrease memory usage a bit too, but unless all those threads are being used for debugging purposes, then various performance and resource issues will still exist when IE8 is out of beta.
Threads are a great thing. Even a lot of threads are a great thing... but those have prerequisites, such as thread workload that is independent of each other to a decent extent, not overrunning the operating system's ability to efficiently manage and schedule threads, not overrunning the various subsystems that each thread (or a lot of them) may be calling (for instance, in this case, the hard drive, TCP/IP stack and/or rendering engine), and a design that scales down to resource availability of the computer hardware (you dont want to try to use that many resources or threads on a slow computer... CPU, bus, RAM, HDD, etc).
Thus, the real remaining questions are (since you probably/hopefully correctly covered the memory footprint issue in pointing out it is a beta and probably has a lot of debug code loaded/running) are:
- Is IE8's threading model designed to be usable on low end hardware?
- Can the XP or Vista thread scheduler efficiently handle that many threads?
- When they designed this implementation, did they take into account hardware capabilities?
- And of course, how much of the bloat is actually due to the debug code, and how much (like in recent MS products) is "bloat by design"?
Until then, I've got no real opinion on how IE8 will perform, since there is a lack of too much necessary information to make an intelligent determination on a product that has yet to be released as GA.
And after then, honestly, I (personally) really dont care. I only fire up IE to test web pages - or for the relatively rare (nowadays) IE only site.
As for the rest of the world, they will either find it's speed acceptable, or not. If they don't, they will either find Firefox - or not.
Either way, the bigger issue (at least on any web programmer's mind) is standards compatibility... not speaking for anyone but myself, unless the performance is so horrendous that I now have to be coding "lite" sites so IE8 doesnt take forever to render them, then I really dont care if it's bloated or not. Me ranting about the bloat would be just that... ranting. Doesn't affect me unless the performance noticeaby impacts how quickly my sites load.
Though it is fun to rant any time ________ screws something up (fill in the blank with whatever company or product currently fits the "Mod this post up" criteria... I stopped keeping track of who we are supposed to rant about weeks ago). ;-)
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Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:5, Insightful)
OK. We can compare it to FF3 beta, then. That was fast as hell.
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Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:5, Insightful)
Blame Google.
I know too many people that think "beta" means Gold (or at least Release Candidate). I wouldn't be surprised if they now think "beta" is synonymous with freeware.
Anything beta should be given a lot leeway in terms of stability and performance.
On the other hand, if the difference is DRASTICALLY different from past versions then maybe it brings some pause. While it could simply be the package isn't optimized and there are debug lines in there, it is also possible that it is a sign that the end-product might be a hog.
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Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:4, Funny)
I hate being turned into a Microsoft apologist on this one, but give them a break. IE8 is still beta. Comparing release quality software to beta quality software is simply unfair.
Microsoft is a lot like Google in that their software never makes it out of beta; unlike Google, they don't admit it.
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Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but I'd like to point out that process isolation comes at a cost. Many users were rejoicing yesterday when it was announced that Google Chrome would have process isolation. Google was very up front about the fact that the browser would use MORE memory as a result. However, the security, memory cleanup, process tracking, and isolation features were all considered worth it.
So give IE a break here. If you want to complain, complain about the fact that it STILL doesn't support the standards and that it STILL uses that God-awful IE7 interface.
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Linux and probably Mac OS win here (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only that, but I'd like to point out that process isolation comes at a cost.
This is a much bigger issue on Windows than on Linux, because Windows processes are much more heavyweight. Try a program that recursively calls itself via system(). 100 calls of the program on Windows take about 7 seconds (!) IIRC, while on Linux 10000 calls take 5 seconds on the same machine. I'll do a more rigorous benchmark later because I think this issue will keep resurfacing. However, I don't know whether this is due to an incredibly slow system() implementation on Windows or process creation overhead. Note: on Linux the shell forks to execute the new program, so you actually have twice the amount of new processes created.
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At Least Some Features Are a Step Forward (Score:5, Interesting)
First off, I deal a lot with AJAX and I think a lot of people feel my pain when we have to write two different Javascript methods to achieve the same functionality between IE6, IE7 & everybody else. And I don't want to hear anybody saying that IE keeps me employed by creating more work. That's bullshit, all it does is hinder my productivity. But now we have:
The getElementById method is now case-sensitive, and it no longer incorrectly performs searches using the NAME attribute.
My god, you mean it's actually going to behave like--you know--the name implies?!
Sanitize HTML -- Easily remove event properties and script from HTML fragments with window.toStaticHTML.
I am intrigued by this and think that this is a great innovative idea from a developer's perspective.
CSS Compliance
I don't think I would be the first person to say compliance to standards are currently lacking in IE. I'm glad to see them acknowledging this area of improvement!
At least it's a step in the correction direction! And on top of that, they are slowly catching up with Firefox plugins like Firebug or a their profiling tools:
I dream of a future where I have means other than javascript popups to check objects in javascript in IE. Yes, yes, I know they have a script debugger today ... if you have some form of .NET studio installed. Which is just peachy if you run Linux and IE4Linux.
... even if it assumes RAM is cheap and your CPU has over 171 cores to spare.
I am both curious of the new AJAX functionality they promise and fearful that they are simply another venue for security risks (let's all hope their cross-domain & cross-document functionalities are sound).
I do not think all is lost on this browser, however
Re:At Least Some Features Are a Step Forward (Score:5, Insightful)
You make a lot of good points. I think I'm pretty fair to MS; I bash them when I think they deserve it, I praise them when I think they deserve it.
Frankly, I've stayed away from a lot of "fancy" javascript just to avoid having duplicate code; and I've also abandoned some pretty cool CSS just to avoid IE problems (although they may be compliant, I actually think in some cases MSs implementation of CSS was better than the standard, especially their box model... there's more but I don't want to get into it.
In this case, not only do we have to allow that this is a beta, but I think we need to point out that most people will not be browsing with a bunch of tabs. I know I do, and I'm sure a lot of slashdotter's do, but I also think we're the exception and most of us probably have more than capable machines to handle it.
That's not an excuse... the requirements should go down, I agree... but on the other hand, the browser IS becoming the platform, so you have to expect it to increase in requirements.
I'm happy for IE8; I hope it becomes widely adopted... and I think competition is good, but if IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome... if they can all just act the same compliant way, I'll be happy guy. I certainly won't berate MS for it.
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Re:At Least Some Features Are a Step Forward (Score:5, Funny)
It's a strange feeling having the page display the same (with the same code!) in all major browsers.
This is just a beta release. Give it time--I'm sure that Microsoft will fix this obvious bug before IE8 release.
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Re:At Least Some Features Are a Step Forward (Score:5, Interesting)
To sum it up, there's often no real benefit to doing trivial things (e.g. rendering JPEGs) in parallel, because you're obligating the OS to say "you, now you, now you" when the designer should have just done them in series anyway.
Well, the one advantage is that the "abundantly" threaded version will continue to scale on those 64-core CPUs that Intel and AMD like to show off every now and then. 4-core systems are comparatively common now, either with Core 2 Quad CPUs or two Core 2 Duos (or Opterons), and I'm betting that Microsoft thinks that the extra overhead will be smaller than the gain from having more threads which can be load-balanced.
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Microsoft bashing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Multi threaded browsing is a plus. One of my pet hates of Firefox is the one-bad-tab-crashes-the-browser problem.
I've not used IE for donkey's years, but one thread per tab strikes me as an excellent idea.
Re:Microsoft bashing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, 380 MB for a multi-tab session would be about what I expect.
Firefox will happily use that much RAM.
Currently 4 tabs RSIZE 129M VSIZE 412M on OSX
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Re:Microsoft bashing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Y'know, I hear that a lot, but have just never seen any version of FireFox use all that much memory.
Right now, I have about 8 tabs open (after many hours of browsing without restarting FF), including a flash game, a GIS on about the 20th page, and a Fark photoshopping contest, and have 70MB working set (RSize), 125MB Virtual (VSize). And that looks pretty much typical on my system for FireFox.
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Re:Microsoft bashing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Multi threaded browsing is a plus. One of my pet hates of Firefox is the one-bad-tab-crashes-the-browser problem.
I've not used IE for donkey's years, but one thread per tab strikes me as an excellent idea.
It seems Google thinks the same. Chrome will have this as a feature supposedly.
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Re:Microsoft bashing? (Score:5, Informative)
Chrome will have one process per tab as a feature. See here. [gamesforthebrain.com]
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Re:Microsoft bashing? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, IE uses one process per tab. This means that each tab has a different address space, and this is what makes it so that one bad tab crashes only itself and not the entire browser. If they were only doing threads, it'd be what Mozilla does.
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Re:Microsoft bashing? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is interesting, is that people seem to completely miss how multithreading works - because it will not solve that problem, at all. If, in a multithreaded application, one thread violates some memory restriction (e.g. stack overflow or accessing already released memory), the entire application will crash just like any other (single-threaded) application.
What multithreading *can* help solve though, is the random "freezing up" of Firefox whenever another tab decides to reload itself, or when a wayward Flash plugin causes the entire browser to freeze for indefinite amounts of time, etc.
The programmers of Firefox are very obviously aware of these problems, but it's incredibly hard to change the event-handling system once you have a complete application. Especially since these days, Javascript is used to do large-scale manipulations of the document, it becomes really hard to decide what data to share between threads, prevent race conditions and the inadvertent introduction new security risks, etc. etc.
So I'm sure we'll see quite a few problems with these new "multi-threaded" browsers, before the technology matures.
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Wow.... (Score:5, Funny)
We finally found something that sucks more CPU power than Crysis.
Real geeks... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Real geeks... (Score:5, Funny)
Real geeks parse the HTTP responses in their head.
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Beta... (Score:5, Insightful)
Beta and debug code (Score:5, Informative)
As such, it'll have debug code in it, which tend to bump up the number of execution threads considerably.
You can try the same thing by running an IE7 beta against the release version and looking at the processes. The beta version is much more of a resource hog. It sounds a bit like someone hasn't considered the full picture in this 'comparison'...
bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Unless those threads are actually processing anything, they represent basically zero overhead.
Porcine? Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
171 threads may actually be a good sign! (Score:5, Interesting)
380 MB RAM is a lot, but don't forget about debugging code which may decrease this substantailly.
Why should 171 threads be a problem? Threads are pretty cheap today. Creation is fast and while asleep they use up almost no resources. It's a good sign that MS may be able to utilize current and future multicore CPUs.
Ok, thread pools and runnable objects might have been better style. 171 threads indicate that software engineering could not agree on a single Grand Central and every team is allowed to spawn as many threads as they want. But hey, threads are cheap - stil way better than Firefox' single process model.
Fatter or Faster? (Score:4, Funny)
My heart stopped for a moment as I thought i'd read 'faster'...
More "demanding" than XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Internet Explorer 8 is in fact more demanding on your PC than Windows XP itself
Uh, shouldn't it be? The whole point of an OS is to be a platform for applications which do the actual final work for the end user. I would hope the browser would use more CPU and RAM than the OS core processes, otherwise that would be an incredibly inefficient OS.
have we forgotten chrome already? (Score:5, Insightful)
I could have sworn that yesterday there was a link to a comic book on this very site that was extoling the VIRTUES of having a browser that uses many processes (which are the heavy hitters, threads are cheap) with a logical minimum of 1 thread per process. Oh, right, M$ == automatically teh wrong, I forgot, forgive me.
Software grows, hardware grows, weeds grow. These things are inevitable, get over them. Don't believe me? Compare the memory footprint of firefox to that of IE4. Oh, features you say? Guess what, that's growth.
Signed,
A future Chrome user temporarily stuck advocating Opera
Porcine (Score:5, Funny)
Vista's performance is "porcine" enough by itself, but combined with the new and "improved" IE, you will start thinking about yourself as a swineherd [wikipedia.org]
Google Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you'll find Google Chrome will have the same problem. It creates a new entire browser PROCESS for each tab. What could be more bloaty than that? That will mean LOTS more RAM. Stop worrying and just buy more RAM - it's dirt cheap and the Google Chrome model of creating a new process for each new site will mean we have a much more stable browser. Google Chrome and IE8 are designed for modern multi-core systems with plenty of RAM - not for running on your 7 year old Pentium 3. Deal with it. They're not forcing you to upgrade, so if you don't have lots of RAM, stick with a memory efficient browser such IE6 and avoid memory hog browsers like Firefox and IE7-8.
I never get why people are so worried when apps USE their RAM. That's what it's for. As long as it's not due to leak (ie ram usage after a point, remains constant rather than growing infinitely) then I don't get the problem.
Developer Workstations at Microsoft? (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps Microsoft should consider giving their developers sub-1GHZ pentium II systems with S3 video, 512MB of RAM and 80GB hard drives. Perhaps then there'd be some incentive to write lean software that runs quickly (or at all) on that setup.
Re:Firefox is a pig (Score:5, Insightful)
Fatter than a bloated pig means a lot more than lean and snappy Opera.
The "fatter than XP" metric doesn't make much sense to me though. Since you buy a computer to run applications, not operating systems, shouldn't you expect that most of your resources are going to the applications?
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Re:Firefox is a pig (Score:5, Funny)
Since you buy a computer to run applications, not operating systems, shouldn't you expect that most of your resources are going to the applications?
Yes, but hopefully not a single application.
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Re:Firefox is a pig (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Firefox is a pig (Score:5, Funny)
It's designed by Microsoft to answer user complaints of "System Idle Processes" using up so much CPU. This can almost guarantee to lower the resource hog that is "System Idle Processes".
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Re:Firefox is a pig (Score:5, Informative)
Whether or not parallel code is superior to a single-threaded solution depends on the application and the actual implementation. In some cases there's no way to actually make a multi-threaded version of the same application any faster, the best you can hope for is the same level of performance. In other cases the assumptions made when deciding what parts of the application should be in separate threads turn out to be incorrect.
Multi-core is working because most people now run multiple applications at a time, not because more applications take advantage of multi-threading properly (not to mention that the OS itself is using CPU time in addition to any applications you are using). Going from 2 to 4 cores has proven less beneficial for most users simply because people so rarely use the CPU resources they have, and the problems of getting more benefit in a single application from 4 cores are even more complicated than 2, except in specific applications.
Browsers, especially in a world of multi-tab browsers with higher use of flash and javascript on the web, should be able to benefit from multi-threading, but how much benefit can be gained and whether or not the initial assumptions programmers make going into the project are correct are the main questions at hand.
Of course, 171 threads makes you wonder what assumptions they were making, or even what they're doing with those threads.
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Re:Firefox is a pig (Score:5, Insightful)
Because everyone already knows that Firefox is a bloated pig, and that Opera is much leaner. Showing that IE is more bloated that Opera isn't saying all that much; most things are more bloated than Opera. To claim that IE is more bloated than even Firefox, however, really takes the cake. When you're not rolling your own runtime envionment and yet you still consume more than Firefox does, that's when you know you've really screwed up.
Note that I say this as a Firefox user.
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Re:Firefox is a pig (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess you missed the memo? [dotnetperls.com] If that article's to be believed, Firefox 3's memory usage is around 50% - 75% of Opera 9.5's. Or am I misreading the graphs?
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Check the current poll, man. (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, it did not take too long before fanbois invaded the discussion. It is difficult to determine who are more annoying fanbois. Apple's or Opera's? May be a possible poll suggestion?
I think that the current poll is "Which Fanboys Make You Cringe the Most?"
As for IE8, I guess somebody saw all the bitching people do about how Firefox is a resource hog and decided, "I'll give 'em something to cry about."
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Re:Check the current poll, man. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well this is from the same folks that brought you Vista,which spawned one of my favorite new sayings "I got Vista'd! Real hard!". I got that one from a gas station attendant of all people,who practically dropped to his knees and begged me to build him a new machine after a month with a Compaq Vista box.
But seriously,WTF are the guys at MSFT thinking? Have they not seen how the netbooks are taking off? Or how folks are not using these quad core beasts to run their day to day tasks? Folks are getting smarter and not wanting some giant electricity sucking monster just to check their email. The only ones I know that go for the monsters anymore are the hardcore gamers and their mantra is "More resources for the game,always and forever!" which is why I am waiting for parts to build another gamer rig right now. If MSFT doesn't pull its head out of its butt and get back on track they'll find that while Apple and mini-Linux boxes sell off the shelves the retailers will be doing like the Local Wal Mart and offering to toss Vista for XP on every model they sell.
My advice,bring back the guys that made Win2K and put out a low resource OS that runs well. Hell,they could repackage XP SP3 and make a metric ton o' cash just like they did with SP2. Because when your customers go "EEEEW" when you say Vista as an option,you know it is bad. And here I was getting ready to try IE8 just to see how it ran on XP. Now I'll be chunking it in the recycle bin. Way to go,fitting with your always behind the curve and too bloated stereotype MSFT! But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
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Gentoo, schmentoo. (Score:4, Funny)
"y'know, if you compiled that from source like Gentoo does, it would be a lot faster..."
Gentoo's worthless and weak. You should have compiled it on Source Mage [sourcemage.org]. :)
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Re:Gentoo, schmentoo. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Gentoo, schmentoo. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Still only a beta (Score:4, Interesting)
What do you guys think beta means? In my industry, alpha = feature complete, beta = release candidate 1. Improvements after beta would be high priority bug fixes, crash fixes, etc. Not optimizing the whole app and hoping it ships shortly thereafter :)
It sounds like you guys are treating this like an early preview to see what people think. That would be a prototype build, not a beta build. Prototype is pre-alpha and normally doesn't get released.
If this thing is beta and uses a lot of ram and threads, that isn't going to change more than a few percent before it ships.
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Re:Lost in Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Beta is expected to have bugs, but it should be feature and configuration complete. This would mean that unless there are some serious show-stoppers found during beta testing, the Beta version is pretty much what you can expect from the release version.
Alpha, on the other hand, is still considered to be a work in development.
With all that said, Microsoft is well aware of its bloated nature of its software. It sees no reason to change that in the slightest still depending on Moore's law and the ever-increasing capacity of PCs. 640K really SHOULD be enough for anyone. A surprising amount of processing code could be made to fit in that "tiny" space. But then again, I come from a time when code was supposed to be as tiny as humanly possible and C code was simply too wasteful and slow -- Assembler was the language to write in when you wanted small and fast. And write in assembly language I did. It really wasn't all that hard, but it wasn't nearly as visual as today's programming environments either -- you had to imagine boxes and buffers and index registers while writing code. All math was integer math unless you were a PARTICULARLY good coder or had some really nice libraries. Those were actually some pretty good days. It's really sad to see gigabyes of RAM being required to do some fairly simple things.
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Re:Lost in Translation (Score:5, Informative)
That price would be your soul and anything that would be standards compliant.
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