Comparing Memory Usage of Firefox 2 vs 3 402
DaMan writes "ZDNet picks up on yesterday's Firefox 3 beta 1 review by comparing the memory usage of Firefox 2 against the latest beta. The results from one of the tests is quite interesting, after loading 12 pages and waiting 5 minutes, 2 used 103,180KB and 3 used 62,312KB. IE used 89,756KB.""
Strange, 1p/10 mins more than 12pp/5 mins? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems to me that memory usage must still spiral under 3 beta, otherwise how would the single page/10 min usage be less than the 12pp/5 min test? Sure, it's not as bad, but that number really caught my eye... more testing is in order if I can get some time away from the in-laws over the holiday.
Re:How are they measuring? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And Opera (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, people used to make fun of GNU Emacs, saying things like it stands for eight megabytes and constantly swapping or eventually malloc()'s all computer storage. Emacs takes somewhere around 10MB or so on a RHEL4 box, and that thing is practically an operating system. It reads mail! Firefox doesn't even read mail, and it takes 60MB. Opera reads mail, but still 34MB seems just too big, too.
Maybe I'm just getting to be a cranky old man. Now you kids get offa my lawn!
12 pages? Who has 12 tabs open? (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW I never found old FireFox's memory consumption as annoying as intransigence of some sites in refusing to support Firefox and the lax/laisse-faire coding for IE only. May be because at work I usually have a couple of four processor 16GB machine for development/testing. I used to have a dedicated 2GB machine exclusively for Firefox. But that old machine's hard disk started squealing with an annoying noise so I had to throw it away. Even at home with my puny 512MB 4 year old desktop or the 1GB 2 year old laptop I get by without any serious memory issues.
Re:How are they measuring? (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, I just tried the same thing with Opera--it dropped from 60,000 to 11,000.
I don't think it's an estimate--I think the program really uses less RAM when minimized.
Re:And Opera (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How are they measuring? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yeah but it's still beta (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm reverting back to Firefox 2 for the time being, and will file a bug report once I have some more time to find out what's causing the issue...
Memory AND speed issues (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:not to point out the obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm feeling the same (Score:3, Interesting)
Checking RAM usage, it's using 237MB right now, as reported by Process Explorer.
Re:What a stupid "test" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yeah but it's still beta (Score:3, Interesting)
I can reproduce it every single time.
Re:not to point out the obvious (Score:1, Interesting)
You probably were foolishly deceived into thinking of extensions like an extension, something that hooked into well define extension points. (I wonder where you got that idea?)
They aren't.
Think of an extension as a run-time patch, which is much closer to the truth. There's no separate name space for extensions. This means that extensions can step on each other, since they're all operating in the same giant JavaScript mess.
When it comes to the UI, the browser uses a system called "overlays" which are basically a method for specifying an XML patch. It literally patches the browser's internal XML representation of the UI with new elements.
Two things there: first, the UI is represented by an XML tree at run time. (And you wondered why Firefox took a lot of memory?) Secondly, it actively alters the internal structure. There's no way to separate memory usage into what the extension added and what Firefox started with, because it's merged into a single final "patched" version of Firefox.
Firefox extensions don't so much extend the browser as they actually alter them. One side effect is that extensions can't be toggled on or off without restarting the browser.
Ultimately there's no way to track how much memory they're using compared to how much Firefox is using, because the final result in a "patched" Firefox with the original Firefox XML and JavaScript merged with all the extension XML and JavaScript.
Re:How are they measuring? (Score:4, Interesting)
AND - Sysinternals used to distribute the source on some of their tools. No longer. It's out there. But it's not legal.
Re:And Opera (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Firefox Memory Leaks, C++ Memory Leaks (Score:2, Interesting)
Let me be clear, both Firefox and IE leak memory so badly that even on management PC with 2GB of RAM we have to require the end user to restart the browser every week. We are monitoring FF3 and looking forward to reduced memory leakage. In the referenced article [pavlov.net] it discusses reducing memory fragmentation. OK, that's a worthy goal but first fix the memory leaks. Memory fragmentation and memory leaks are related, but different beasties. A memory leak almost always results in fragmentation, but fragmentation can happen simply from an unfortunate memory allocation/deallocation pattern.
Regarding C++ and memory leaks: over 2 1/2 years we've worked on the embedded code, which is pure C++, we have hunted exactly one memory leak. And that leak turned out to be from the OS. We use Boost smart pointers [boost.org], RAII [wikipedia.org], exceptions, and exception safe code [ddj.com]. We have no trouble with leaks or fragmentation, despite a fairly high turnover rate and a customer base that would quickly notice memory leaks requiring reboot of the embedded devices.
Re:Yes, but... looking in the wrong spot! :) (Score:2, Interesting)
Right now I'm running the firefox-3.0b2pre nightly builds and firefox is taking 236MB of virual memory. X is using 3560MB and xrestop shows the firefox pixmaps as being responsible for 2714M of that.
Re:And Opera (Score:3, Interesting)