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."
Re:Finally... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Pfft. (Score:5, Interesting)
I use Firefox and Safari regularly. I use two web browsers because each one does something vastly better than the other. Firefox for porn and online transactions, Safari for basic day-to-day anything that might include bookmark management (long story short, every browser I've used EXCEPT safari still does bookmark management using some variant of the horrific Netscape method - this includes IE, Mozilla, Firefox, etc - whereas Safari is the first browser I've used that does it in a non-bullshit fashion). However, useable as it is for bookmarks, Safari's a dick when it comes to password management and a few other things - most notably, how the browser handles while the system is paging out or otherwise shot in the ass with RAM overuse from other applications.
Long story short, under ANY kind of system load - we're talking ANYTHING above IDLE - Firefox is more responsive than Safari. When the system is shitting gold plated bricks trying to deal with the demands After Effects or Photoshop or Final Cut Pro is putting on it, Safari is beyond useless... and Firefox is responsive.
It all boils down to memory usage. Specifically, Swap/pagefile useage. On the Mac, firefox seems to be more responsive under load while safari is LESS responsive under the same conditions - it has ultimately has nothing to do with RAM usage and everything to do with how the respective applications use swap/pagefile.
Eat as much ram as you like... but until Apple does something about disk I/O, stay the HELL away from swap - or I'll use the application that does. (namely, Firefox.)
Re:IE8, huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
On one of my machines, IE8 is slightly faster than FF. But on my old slow machine, IE8 is *much less* of a memory pig, so much so that I had to drop FF simply because after awhile with a few tabs open, it slowed my machine to a crawl and eventually required me to kill it in the Task Manager.
Some people have tried to tell me that I just don't know how to set FF up to run efficiently. I say that I shouldn't have to.
I'm not happy about this because *I am not* a "whatever works" guy, I very much want to support OSS and spacifically FF. But it just doesn't work for me. Right now. Yet.
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
how is his memory usage that low? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is the Linux version of Firefox particularly horrid or something? When using more than 10 tabs or so, my memory usage is typically in the 600mb+ range. It's currently taking 1.1g resident for about 40 tabs. I'm on x86-64, but even if we assume there's a full doubling of RAM usage due to the architecture, that's still 550mb equivalent, which his test never hits even with 150 tabs.
Re:IE8, huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously? I've never seen IE8 take up less memory than FF, ever, for any combination of pages. Right out of the box, FF is much lighter weight.
I can't imagine what you were doing wrong.
IE8 hardly matters for people who choose a browser (Score:3, Interesting)
You test all the browsers except the most up-to-date version of the most popular one. In other words, the one that matters the most.
Benchmarks are for people who choose software. Only a small minority choose IE. In a way, IE8 was included. It failed to compete due to lack of necessary features.
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who uses vanilla FF anyway? (Score:3, Interesting)
He was probably referring to things like the plugins that make Firefox's tabbed browsing not suck. It's a sad state of affairs when the browser that introduced tabs to the masses (not the first, but the first with more than about 5% market share) now has one of the worst tabbed interfaces by default. No tab groupings, no jumping back-and-forth using Ctrl-Tab (it cycles through the whole list instead), etc.
Config (Score:2, Interesting)
Terminal Server / Citrix / etc. Thin Client (Score:2, Interesting)
In these environments, memory allocation is an extremely important capacity planning criterion for application deployment.
\\ would love a Firefox addon or web proxy for remote desktop environments that dynamically rewrites the header of flash movies to allow globally reducing the playback frame rate to something arbitrary (like 2fps), as it would much more user-friendly than blocking flash altogether. I would site-license 1000 copies of that sucka tomorrow...
Re:Why are we so worried about RAM (Score:3, Interesting)
This is simply not true for things like web browsing. How are you going to "recompute" a web page the user visited 10 minutes ago? The only way to make going back to that page fast is to cache it. RAM is a fine way of caching things.
There are a variety of tradeoffs possible. Do we:
1 Just store the original HTML/compressed images? This was Netscape's original solution, and works reasonably well.
2 Store parsed HTML, to prevent a reparse stage being necessary when redisplaying the page?
3 Store uncompressed images, to prevent decompression being necessary when redisplaying the page?
4 Store the DOM and layout information, to prevent relayout being necessary when redisplaying the page?
5 Store an image of the page as it was shown to the user with their browser size/settings as they were when it was last shown?
Each of these successively takes less cpu time but uses more memory than the previous. Firefox does the latter, and I'm not at all convinced that is the right point in the tradeoff. Redrawing the page image from the DOM should take only a few milliseconds. Recalculating the DOM and layout is more intensive, but still not likely to take long. I'm not sure which of 3 or 4 I think is best, but I suspect it is one of those. Although even 2 is worth considering, as it is a substantial memory saving compared to 3, and probably wouldn't take too long.
Re:Chrome stats probably erroneous (Score:3, Interesting)
Try not to betray your ignorance so readily. On Linux, you can get something pretty close by summing all the rw sections of /proc/self/maps and then counting the r sections once. External programs don't matter, obviously, because they're all the same for all browsers, so if you count them or not, it's the same result, just so long as you do things consistently.
Someone with more Windows knowledge can probably tell you how to do this with Windows. I'm pretty sure you can get the loaded module list with Windows, at least, and maybe even some information about how much memory each is using.
Again, someone competent would know this. Just because it's hard doesn't mean someone competent can't figure it out. I've done this kind of thing plenty of times, though on Unix OSes, so save your condescension for the peanut gallery.
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Interesting)
mount -t tmpfs -o 'size=100M' tmpfs
Create an about:config preference called browser.cache.disk.parent_directory with a string value of
You do need to restart the browser for it to take effect. I also chowned the ram disk to my user name so that FF can write to it. 100MB is probably a bit too big, but when I set it as 50MB it filled up. I'll tweak it later when I see what is usual for the cache. It's currently running at 47.47MB with 2 tabs, and I'm not anal about avoiding closing the browser if I'm not using it.
Re:Chrome stats probably erroneous (Score:2, Interesting)
The about:memory in chrome gave me this:
Browser Private Shared Total Private Mapped
Chromium 2.0.172.31 168,244k 4,472k 172,716k 190,248k 42,868k
Firefox 3.0.11 151,384k 5,332k 156,716k 142,432k 3,968k
FF plugins are disabled.
According to chrome, 'private' is the best indicator.
Re:Opera (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting to see that Opera is not the memory sipping, lightweight browser that it's proponents make it out to be.
Opera has advanced memory caching. When you close a tab, it remains cached in RAM. If you decide to undo the operation and reopen it, nothing is usually reloaded from the disk cache or the network (Opera even keeps the tab history cached, so you can go back and forward with lightning speed on a reopened tab). Other browsers don't do anything like that, so when a tab is reopened, they reload the content (to put it differently, when a tab is closed in Fx/Safari/Chrome, it's gone from RAM, as can be seen from the sharp drops in the graph from TFA).
This just isn't a valid test because Opera works differently from everything else, which is why I love it; advanced caching is one of those things that make all other browsers "unusable" for an Opera user.
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:1, Interesting)
You have to look at it from another perspective. Before AJAX, it was impossible to have threaded discussions on web pages.
Re:Tabs hell (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Finally... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:3, Interesting)
I wrote a blog entry just yesterday about Slashdot's completely ignorance of the term "staging server": http://blakeyrat.com/index.php/2009/06/slashfail/ [blakeyrat.com]
Re:Moving targets (Score:3, Interesting)
Memory usage is important, but absolute numbers are not. Scalability is the key.
If a browser can run fine on a phone with very limited memory and processor speed, but then scale up nicely to my desktop machine which has 6GB RAM than to me that seems like the best option.
BTW, my desktop machine really does have 6GB RAM, and my laptop 2GB. 2GB of DDR2 RAM is less than £20 now, so I'd rather have a browser that can make good use of it and speed up navigation and rendering than have one which leaves 80% of the machines resources unused. I spend at least 50% of my time at the computer in my browser, probably more. Of course it needs to back off when I want to run other apps too, but the OS should be able to work with the app to make that happen.
Re:Finally... (Score:2, Interesting)