IE8 Beta 2 Fatter Than Firefox and XP 597
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."
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.
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: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.
Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:5, Insightful)
OK. We can compare it to FF3 beta, then. That was fast as hell.
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
Beta... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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.
Porcine? Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Re:At Least Some Features Are a Step Forward (Score:3, Insightful)
I do not think all is lost on this browser, however ... even if it assumes RAM is cheap and your CPU has over 171 cores to spare.
I currently have 191 processes on my dual-core processor. I also have an OS that knows how to run more than one program at a time. Basically, I'd rather have an interactive program that splits its load over 171 threads or processes and let the OS handle scheduling than one that tries to do everything in one thread or process. After all, the OS has a few decades of optimizations for exactly this under its belt.
Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Still only a beta (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not what these guys think a beta means. It's what Microsoft has trained them to believe. Look at all the "betas" Microsoft has released, as OSes, betas that they even asked people to pay (and some morons actually paid). Betas where complete code rewrites were the norm (see win2k) between beta releases or "release candidates".
Bah. The fact that users let them do it, and the fact that IT press let them do it. Double Bah.
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.
Interesting Contrast to Chrome (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/# [google.com]
I wonder how Chrome will compare resource wise. Its a 1 PROCESS per Tab model.
Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:3, 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.
This conception is partly Google's fault. They release so many products as 'beta' which in actual fact are finished, but going to have alterations made later, that a lot of people have forgotten what beta really means.
I release beta's only for intermediate and not fully tested versions of my software which I don't really expect to be usable yet, they are most often released for interested people to lift out the code they want and/or test it. Google release products that they expect millions to use as they are and leave them as beta until they are way beyond finished by any other measure.
I go for full releases when I reach a development plateau where everything is tested and working as far as I can tell, and I want to have a proper release that my users can rely on before moving on.
Were I to go the Google way my five year old product would still be in beta, since I've yet to reach the full state I want it to reach.
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.
Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Firefox is a pig (Score:3, Insightful)
I keep my Firefox updated, and I've noticed some CPU and memory reduction. I appreciate this. But when you're starting out at what FF2 had, you can have significant -even major- reduction while still being a bloated pig, and even with the improvements FF3 still has yet to completely escape from that trap.
Re:Firefox is a pig (Score:4, Insightful)
I could make a program that will spawn 300 pointless threads if you want. Doesn't make it impressive at all.
Parallel code that works faster is superior to a single thread solution sure, but unless your threads really are usefully independent then you will just make the whole thing less efficient due to the extra overhead. What possible need is there for 171 threads in a web browser unless it has like 50 tabs open?
Re:Still only a beta (Score:1, Insightful)
Agreed. The IE team has only 4 months to RTM. I seriously doubt were going to see a huge performance increase in the time between.
And as someone else said, Firefox betas were pretty damn fast. Hell firefox alphas were fast and and had better memory usage.
Re:Check the current poll, man. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that the current poll is "Which Fanboys Make You Cringe the Most?"
As a firefox user, I've gotta admit FF fanboys make me cringe the most.
Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Google does it that way because, for a hosted web application, version numbers are meaningless. There's just "the version", the one that's up there. It's not like you could have two people using different versions of Google Documents somewhere. Knowing that, and knowing that they're never "finished", it makes sense that they're just always in beta.
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).
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.
Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only that, but I'd like to point out that process isolation comes at a cost.
Agreed, and a total of 17 threads per tab doesn't seem an unreasonable cost for what it gives us: browser tabs and windows that can be managed independently, even when one is stuck in an infinite loop of javascript.
And the memory usage doesn't seem _that_ bad, either. No worse than FF2 was for similar scenarios, in my experience. We've got spoiled by the good memory usage stats of FF3.
And, no, I don't see 300-400MB of browser usage being "the long awaited "killer app" that drives customers towards 4GB+ systems and the 64-bit flavors of Windows Vista/7." First of all, all current 32-bit versions of windows are capable of handling 4GB of RAM perfectly fine. We're talking using less than 10% of that RAM, *while the browser is in heavy use*. Stop using it, and it'll be swapped out. What do you want to do that'll use the other 90% of that RAM at the same time?
And this might be a bit non-traditional, but if I find myself needing more than 4GB, I still don't see myself heading for Vista-x64: Win2K3 is a perfectly acceptable operating system which doesn't lack any features I find myself wanting, is available in OEM editions for less than $100 and supports up to 64GB of RAM in its 32-bit version.
And what's so wrong with spawning a lot of threads? "By greatly increasing the number of concurrent execution threads, and then spreading them out across multiple, discrete processes (in our case, 6 separate instances of iexplore.exe), Microsoft seems to be positioning IE 8 to take advantage of the greatly expanded core counts of future Intel and AMD CPUs - at the cost of overwhelming today's single and dual-core PCs." Not as far as I see no. The cost of a thread is a little memory and a tiny amount of overhead in switching. And neither does the test data they cite support it: IE8 is using less CPU time than firefox, so clearly those threads aren't that problematic.
"No matter how you slice the data, IE 8 represents a massive expansion of the baseline runtime requirements for Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser. Meanwhile, the Firefox folks continue to embarrass Microsoft by "doing it better" (including delivering superior performance and overall standards compliance)"
Except, you know, the bit where firefox consumes more CPU time than IE. Or perhaps they meant someting else by "superior performance".
Entire article -- FUD. Pure & simple. Comparing beta software to release, and not even fairly summarising their own results from doing so.
Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, you *can*, but you'll still look like a moron by anybody who has a clue.
Re:Fatter but not Faster (Score:3, Insightful)
Intel's been busy making a whole new line of quad (and greater) core processors with SMT (Hyperthreading). Microsoft writes the bloaty code, intel sells you the chips to run it on.
Considering.... (Score:4, Insightful)
That I HAVE to use IE7/WMP10 to view Netflix Online Instant View content, I am assuming it is simply because of DRM that was imbedded in IE8 to serve said DRM to people that refuse to let the DRM that is Vista on their machines. My guess is that the bloat is just the DRM.
Microsoft wants that DRM on everyones machines at all costs. Vista failed to do it, so now they are trying with their browser, something that most XP users will upgrade to.
I for one, ONLY use IE7(combined with WMP10) to watch Netflix, nothing more. But even in that sense, they got me by the balls. If I do not cave, no Instant View Netflix for me. When they make me switch to IE8 in order to view, my Netflix viewing will cease.
Hear me, Netflix?
Re:Ground up? (Score:3, Insightful)
Webkit isn't a browser, genius, it's a rendering engine. It's more akin to building a car from the ground up using an ENGINE from a Toyota and everything else being your own design.
Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:3, Insightful)
They never focused on rendering correctly...
In the early days, they focused on copying netscape and implementing their own proprietary features to lock users in.
Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:3, Insightful)
It's XP. The VMM was coded for back in the days when 64MB was a lot. In Windows 2000, the VMM would completely swap out an app when you minimized it. This had some interesting effects when you were running, say, an enterprise application server with hundreds of megs of data loaded into it. If you accidentally minimized it, you were going to be waiting a while to see the output window.
Microsoft fixed this somewhat with Windows XP. The "swap on minimize" was effectively removed, but the memory manager was still WAY too aggressive with its swap procedures. If you haven't used an app in a while, you can expect that it has been completely swapped out even if you had more than enough memory to keep it available.
That's why the fastest configuration for Windows is to load up on physical memory and turn off the swap. Your programs will respond WAY faster. Especially programs created in modern OOP environments where heap management tends to be hidden from the OS. The OS will blindly swap, not realizing that the next garbage collection is going to swap all that memory back in.
Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:2, Insightful)
Though since they've apparently decided to NOT default to standards mode... even for release... we can certainly bitch about THAT right now. :)
Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:3, Insightful)
Did somebody formally define a standard for the meaning and boundaries of beta software while I was away?
And, while I'm asking, did someone get such a standard ratified (and hopefully even reviewed) before an international standards organization?
Finally, in this hightly theoretical construct, was someone able to force every software developer and her cats to use that definition?
I didn't think so. You sound very authoritative, but in fact the foundation for your argument is completely ephemeral.
Now, if you have insider information that says that the IE8 bloat consists of a giant delay loop and 100M of easter eggs and backdoors, then that's different.. but until you actually reveal that, you are NOT informative, just truthy at best.
Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:3, Insightful)
I think we can all agree that google's definition of "beta" is very different from Microsoft's definition of "beta".