Memory Usage of Chrome, Firefox 3.5, et al. 505
Posted
by
kdawson
from the gig-here-gig-there-pretty-soon-it-starts-to-add-up dept.
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."
Finally... (Score:1, Insightful)
It doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless you are talking about a system with severely limited memory, memory usage is probably not the right criteria for deciding which browser to use.
Something like "it doesn't show weird ass icons and bars when Slashdot decides to change CSS" is probably much more important. Firefox 3 totally screws up Slashdot in Default mode.
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Something like "it doesn't show weird ass icons and bars when Slashdot decides to change CSS" is probably much more important.
I'm no web developer, but I don't quite believe that those artifacts are Firefox's fault. Why the staff would make broken changes on a live site is anybody's guess. Those artifacts are relatively minor annoyances but they won't serve the people who are considering switching to Linux and getting into open source only to discover that the primary forum for Linux nerds is every bit as broken as the Linux their Microsoft-loving buddies describe.
Who uses vanilla FF anyway? (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course not... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finally... (Score:2, Insightful)
Running a browser as root? You, sir, are a brave man.
Re:Finally... (Score:3, Insightful)
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/7330/picture1uo4.png [imageshack.us]
Firefox is still my browser of choice, due to the plug-ins I use daily. I have to wonder how Flash intensive the sites loaded were.
Was that 3.5 or 3.0? 3.0 has a terrible memory footprint...
Re:Why are we so worried about RAM (Score:1, Insightful)
Desktops are passe. Now people want browsers to run on netbooks, phones and such.
Moving targets (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no answer that's always right. If memory usage was paramount, we'd all have browsers that used 1 MB of RAM and took 10 minutes to render a page, with another 2 minutes to scroll down a page.
But RAM is cheap and developers have to make compromises based on the real-world that they have to compete in. I can get a gig of RAM for about the cost of a burger lunch with my wife.
Do I really care about memory usage? Only to the extent that it's 'good enough' on my slowest computer - a dual-core Mac Mini with 512MB.
FF3 is plenty good enough for me to thoroughly enjoy an episode of 'Burn Notice' on Hulu just now on that very computer.
Sorry you are having probs with memory usage on your (ancient?) computer. Perhaps you should consider forgoing a burger lunch this week?
Why not testing IE 8? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would have preferred to have it included despite this "big drawback" and have this thing explained in a note.
A partially meaningful test (upper limit?) is always better than no test at all!
I fear that this omission is to "protect" bad performances even in comparison of a browser by a company which seems to be in deep competition with Microsoft.
Tabs hell (Score:4, Insightful)
I live in tabs hell. I have... uncountable numbers of tabs open right now--over 9,000, probabaly. My Firefox memory usage can easily push 1400mb. When that happens I kill it and reload, and the memory resets at around 400-600mb.
Seeing this graph, I can only imagine what Chrome would do to me.
Re:Finally... (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally, this should stop perennial "firefox is a memory hog" trolls. Hopefully.
This really hasn't been my experience, and I am not trolling. My experience, which is to say what actually happens to me when I am surfing , is that after awhile with a few (2 or 3) tabs open, FF memory usage rises to the point where my machine crawls to a stop, and I have to kill FF with the task manager.
Why is my FF experience different than the average FF fanboy? Why this is, I don't know. I do know that I am unwilling to get "under the hood" and edit config files, because I don't think I should have to.
This is my experience as what I believe to be "average" use.
That's not normal. Just because someone uses Firefox without it affecting system performance doesn't make that person a "FF fanboy." On XP, Vista, and 7, FF has no obvious effect on my system performance (on a Lenovo T61, my desktop, and my netbook, respectively). I have 3.0.11 on two of those and 3.5 on the other. The only thing I've done to get "under the hood" is install adblock plus. Right now I have 13 tabs open in Vista and FF is using 109 megs of RAM and 0-1% of my CPU cycles, with no noticeable effect on anything else. The only time I've ever felt FF3 affect system performance has been when running flash video on the netbook. Maybe flash ads are the cause of your woes; they're all removed with adblock. You might give it a try.
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:2, Insightful)
Hit the "change" button and the weird ass icons (etc.) disappear.
Same as when the display was eating post titles a while ago...
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
It's totally fucked up in Opera too. Aside from graphics elements appearing randomly all over the screen, it takes a minute to load the page before I can scroll the damn thing. Then it freezes and jerks around.
And the fucking front page that decides to load another 10 stories when IT wants to, and again freezes the screen till it's done.
I can turn off javascript and get a reasonable page that loads quickly and is responsive, or just close the window and go somewhere else.
How the hell they can unleash this piece of shit on a million users is beyond me.
Re:Why are we so worried about RAM (Score:5, Insightful)
In the early days, more RAM meant that you could cache some frequently used information in memory instead of recomputing it or loading it on demand. But there's a diminishing return. Nowadays, it's usually faster to recompute than read it all back from RAM, and if an interactive program uses a lot of RAM, then it's likely keeping a lot of junk in memory that it doesn't need. That tells you that the programmers didn't think things through carefully, and they probably didn't optimize other things that matter either.
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you seen the average corporate america system? They are often running 1 gb max on Windows XP. Add in IT department mandated AV software, management software, business apps coded in a bizarre mixture of visual basic, java, and excel/word macros, auto updaters for 20 different apps, and Outlook or Lotus Notes. I've seen images where just the mandatory software that ran at boot had the workstations paging to disk. In that kind of environment, ram usage matters. 1 app being wasteful with ram is not a big deal, but when all the devs for all the apps you use decide to be lazy, it can be an issue. A web browser should not use excessive ram, and memory leaks are a problem in any app.
Re:Who uses vanilla FF anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have some alternative download UI elements and forecastfox, a couple other plugins, but only an idiot would install anything and not expect SOME cost.
I think basically, my question is, how the hell does the GP get modded up past 1? And how is that insightful when it's either a troll or shows an amazing lack of understanding of how Firefox works? I don't get it.
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you are talking about a system with severely limited memory, memory usage is probably not the right criteria for deciding which browser to use.
Chrome used over 1 GB in this test. Safari and Opera passed the 500 MB mark. That is an issue for far more machines than 'systems with severely limited memory'.
Opera (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting to see that Opera is not the memory sipping, lightweight browser that it's proponents make it out to be.
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad it won't stop all the "what memory problem?" trolls.
Remember how 3.0 was touted to solve all the memory problems? I still get 1.5gb of usage *regularly* on multiple platforms with 3.0.11 without any installed extensions after a few hours. In fact, I'm on Firefox 3.0.11 on OSX 10.5.7 right now and it's at 1.3gb. You can tell when it's being a memory hog again, because videos won't play without stopping and stuttering and pages take longer to load and switching tabs feels glacial.
So, considering 3.0 originally was supposed to solve everything, I think I'll not hold my breath on 3.5. Especially for a problem that continues to happen across platforms.
CPU usage comparison please. (Score:4, Insightful)
I would like to see the CPU usage of different browsers tested. I run Firefox 3.5b and Safari 4 on OS X 10.5, and with JUST ONE TAB open with gmail loaded, firefox uses 8% of the CPU sustained with bursts for some reason to 40%, and safari uses 1%.
With my usual workload, with like 40 tabs open among 5 or 6 windows, Firefox uses 40%, safari 4%. This is ridiculous! This means a lot when you're on a portable on battery, not to mention general system responsiveness.
I would like to see the CPU usage of browsers compared.
Re:Opera (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't really offer opera 10 as a fair comparison until the final version is released.
The pre releases probably contain a lot of debugging information (which naturally bumps up the size quite a bit)
Re:Tabs hell (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, I like opening links, but I just can't bring myself to actually read some of them :P Usually I hang on the right end of the tabs, and try to close/read more than I can open in a day. But, for the past few days I got stuck in the middle somewhere, somehow, opening and closing tabs, surrounded by an ocean of sites. Rather than surfing, I was lost at sea.
And, when I see a tab/site that I know I should read but can't bring myself to, I can't possibly close it. Thus, they accumulate. I can't remember the last time my tab bar was empty :P Except when FF would crash and lose all of them. But that hasn't happened in a long time, thankfully, I hate that! I do try to read some, but it's likely a few weeks worth of reading material by now :P
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Insightful)
This just shows that when more Windows users (or convenience-first users) move to linux, the added security wont help. Users will continue to do everything the way that is most convenient to them, and that is gonna bring more attack vectors aswell. The neverending "linux is just more secure OS" only affects those who know what they're doing, but that way it works in Windows aswell (I dont run av/fw, and I've never had any problems [checked some times really deeply from filemonitors and packet sniffing], but on the hand I know what I'm doing and what not to do).
And no, you cant teach them security. Normal users aren't that interested in it, so they wont learn.
Re:Why are we so worried about RAM (Score:5, Insightful)
Compare recomputing something, where you never have to leave L1 cache, versus flushing the first few cache levels continuously to do spread-out reads of already-computed data. It's very likely, on a modern CPU, that the first will be faster.
Of course, this will vary considerably based on what your actual problem is, and you may be getting into bad "must hand-write assembly" cases which should generally be avoided, but... it is still true that computing every time is not only smaller, it's faster some of the time. For evidence of this, check how some people are finding compiling with -Os instead of -O2 actually produces faster code. In any case... trying to stuff a 1GB working set through the Von Neumann bottleneck [wikipedia.org] is never going to produce an efficient and responsive program. Firefox is not exception here, though it's getting better with each release.
Re:IE8, huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Resource usage, compatability, performance and security. Talking about 1 of the criteria without referring to any of the rest is like talking about trees falling in the forest. Especially when it's not compared with IEx as a reference point, since the earlier versions are still(!) the dominant browser for most of the population.
Re:Finally... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I think you're on the verge of something here. Let me make the step for you. Repeat after me... "Nobody will choose security over convenience."
You can say you know what you're doing, but the only real difference between you and the "convenience users" you mention is that you draw the line in a different place. There are still plenty of things that are probably too inconvenient for you to do, even though they'd make your computer more secure.
Really, the most secure OS is not the one that is off, nor the one that can be used in a secure fashion if you know what you're doing. The most secure OS is the one that makes security convenient.
Re:Finally... (Score:3, Insightful)
> They weren't trolls. I've seen the memory leaks first hand. Plenty of people have posted OS memory usage screenshots. It may have been particular extensions or advanced settings that caused the problems but it was not some work of fiction.
While they weren't trolls, people have been talking about them as if they were still there long after Firefox addressed pretty much all of them. There might be a buggy extension or two still designed to gobble up memory, but I haven't seen one no matter how much I use Firefox on the pitiful machines we have at work, and I use quite a few of the more popular extensions (Adblock+, NoScript, and about a dozen others).
So they weren't trolling, but I suspect some people are still bashing Firefox based on outdated information. Unless you have new OS memory usage screenshots to post?
Re:Moving targets (Score:3, Insightful)
Memory for modern machines may well be very cheap, but memory for older systems is not because it's no longer mass produced, and many older machines have very low limits on the amount of memory they can accept. For example, i have a dell latitude c610 laptop which is perfectly fast enough for general use, but doesn't support more than 512mb of ram.
Those 200 page high blogs are the culprit (Score:2, Insightful)
Those idiots who make blogs with 300 images 400 youtube links that are 600 pages high are idiots.
But they sure push FF to the limit.
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:1, Insightful)
It used up to 1GB on a system with 4GB of RAM, but was also capable of dropping down to ~100MB at intervals (basically the same as Firefox). It should also be considered that Chrome supports prefetching and other features.
How do we know this wasn't just a case of Chrome recognizing that the system had plenty of available RAM, and then doing extra preprocessing to take advantage of it? It might be that Chrome is every bit as memory efficient as Firefox, except that it also does a better job of using whatever extra resources are available.
Re:Finally... (Score:2, Insightful)
There might be some rub-off safety for those that wear the T-shirt, but don't do the karate.
If everyone who didn't do karate thought they were safer wearing this T-shirt, it would become convenient for muggers to attack them.
Re:Pfft. (Score:3, Insightful)
Addons, my man, addons.
AdBlock Plus [adblockplus.org] - block ads, other random stuff if you want (like Slashdot's CSS)
NoScript [noscript.net] - blocks nasty javascript unless you enable it so you don't get owned
DownThemAll! [downthemall.net] - download all linked videos/images from a page
Re:Moving targets (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes - because in the future, mobile devices will need 16G or RAM just to check email, news, weather, and maps. Your ancient POS 3G iPhone is just totally obsolete because it has so little RAM.
But seriously, memory usage IS important - because the browser isn't the only thing I run on my machine, yet seems to suck WAY more memory than most other apps.
Software developers have gotten lazy in not managing memory - they are usually running pretty high-end machines, ignoring the fact that people run OTHER applications too. In the modern economy, people are using older machines longer - and they SHOULD - e-Waste has gotten out of hand, and frankly a 4 year old 2.6G P4 with 512M-1G IS a reasonable machine to use for most business and home (non-gaming) applications. I should not need to upgrade to a quad-core 8G machine just so I can run email, a browser, AND and office app at the same time, when we USED to be able to do that with a 256M machine just fine.
And yes, as another poster already mentioned, not all older machines can be upgraded (especially notebooks), and memory for older machines is a LOT more expensive than a burger lunch. Try more like a meal at a nice restaurant for 4, with a few drinks. By the way - in this modern economy with unemployment continuing to grow, that is a luxury many people can no longer afford.
Re:Finally... (Score:3, Insightful)
Moving for another reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, you did used to be able to do everything you described in 256MB of RAM. But to attribute the biggest increases in web browser memory usage to programmer laziness is to ignore a drastic change in the way we (and by we, I mean the general internet-using public) use web browsers. It's no longer enough to display static web pages. Web applications are mainstream, JavaScript and Flash are practically inescapable.
I was curious, so I just checked memory usage of a web browser (Firefox 3) and an office app (Word 2007). Total memory usage, with four tabs open to fairly intensive sites (slashdot, ars technica, gmail, facebook) and a 10-page document open in Word? 150MB. I do almost all of my web browsing and general computing on a computer with a 1.8GHz Celeron processor and 1GB of RAM. The P4 system you described should be doing just fine.
Re:IE8, huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
You comment that IE8 was slightly faster than FF, but you don't mention which version of FF you were using.
The article is talking about the currently-RC-status 3.5. Were you, by chance, using FF2 or earlier to compare? Earlier versions of Firefox have known issues with memory leaks. Many of these, though not all, have been fixed in the 3.5 version.
If you're going to say that "IE8 is slightly faster than FF" and that it is significantly better on older machines, you really ought to have said which version of Firefox you were using.
Of course, this goes both ways. Saying Firefox 3.5 is lightyears ahead of IE, without mentioning which IE it was being compared with, is utterly useless. Yes, Firefox 3.5 is lightyears ahead of IE5, 5.5, 6, or earlier versions (if they even still exist), but not so much when compared to 7 or 8.
Anecdotal evidence really does need versions along with it to at least look intelligent.
Re:Moving targets (Score:3, Insightful)
Posts like these always amuse me. Yes several years ago we used machines with a lot less ram, they also did a lot less.
You can call it bloat and whine and moan and bitch but your Desktop PC with a modern browser is far different than your 5 year old PC running a browser from 5 years ago.
Just because you aren't observant enough to notice this doesn't mean that software today is the same as it was 5 years ago. I'll ignore the OS for the moment as I'm going to assume you use XP, if you're still using a Unix desktop enviroment from 5 years ago you have bigger issues than anything I or anyone else slashdot can help with.
So lets see you can use:
Firefox 1.0.x (2.0 wasn't released until 2006, and 1.5.x is slightly less than 5 years old)
IE 6 ( 7.0 also came out in 2006 )
Konqueror 3.0/Safari 1.0
Opera 7.5
Looks like all of those browser and software will run just fine on your P4 and half a gig of ram with XP.
So basically what your bitching about is that you can run new software with new features and more resource requirements because you want to use software designed for todays computers on computers that were made years ago. While you're at it why don't you go ahead and make your car run on the same stuff they put into Model T Fords.
If you can take your 4 family members to a nice restuarent and have drinks, you could probably also stay home and buy a netbook with more ram and processing power than your more than 5 year old example POS. You're argument is weak at best, and from a practical perspective you're just completely out of touch with reality.
Whats worse is that its really not bad using some of the modern browsers on the machines you describe, including chrome. The benchmark used is not really any useful indication of real world browsing on a daily basis. Throwing as many pages at the browser as fast as you can for benchmarking leaves no time for background cleanup threads for example, so you can look at Chrome as a memory hog, or you can realize that as soon as it had a chance to get around to doing its cleanup, it dropped its memory usage drastically, and since no person is going to throw URLs at it as fast as the bench mark, it kind of makes this benchmark even more retarded.
Let me finish off with a simple thought about this benchmark. The guy didn't even bother to learn the command line switch to make IE open in an existing Window, why on Earth would you consider his benchmarks anything more than anecdotal evidence until someone actually puts some real ones up?
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps someone should consider the fact that the test is inducing non-standard memory usage in these browsers. The test is in no way an indication of standard browsing habits.
Throwing 1000 urls at a browser as fast as it can load them is very little like loading a page, letting the JS on it run for a few minutes, doing something on the page, waiting a few more minutes and moving on to some other page. In this benchmark is a joke. I've seen a chart for 'memory usage' ... windows has at least 3 different sets you can get back from an API call that I know of off the top of my head, which one are we using? Virtual? Actual? Allocated? Only one of those actually matters as far as performance is concerned. Any developer with a clue can tell you that all of those numbers are likely to be substantially different.
This 'benchmark' is just silly and practically pointless outside of academia. The guy wrote a crappy little .NET app to run some processes and dump 'Mem usage' column from task manager into Excel without actually knowing anything about the way the OS works or what memory allocation numbers actually mean.
Take into account that all of these browsers to some extent adjust the way the operate based on how much RAM the system has means that you will never get results anything like this if you throw it at a machine with say ... 1 Gig of ram.
In short, if you think this 'benchmark' has any real world meaning, you don't really have a clue.