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."
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"
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?
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.
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.
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.
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday June 21, @12:48AM (#28408121)
It's not just firefox either. Over the last couple weeks/. has been a major pain to read via I.E. 7 (what I'm stuck with at work) Opera (9.6 and 10 beta) and with Firefox.
The symptoms are not identical on all three browsers but none of the three has been working like it used to do.
Although it does seem like it's been better the last day or two.
I usually have/. as one of my always open tabs in Opera, but until the last couple days, I've been choosing otherwise, simply because/. was bogging down the entire browser even while I was off reading other tabs. But today, and now that I think of it yesterday as well it was not nearly as annoying.
Be glad you are not using Konqueror 3.5.10 or 4.2.4;/. makes a point of breaking rendering on those browsers every few weeks.
Random buttons and scroll-bars? Check. Black text on black background? Check. Utterly broken navigation so you can watch the front page and nothing else? Check. CSS, Javascript and other crap in _plain text mode_? Check.
The only reason I keep coming back here for is the friendly discussion style;)
I see weird-ass icons and bars on Slashdot comments in Firefox, on Mac OS X 10.5.7 and Windows XP SP2. I don't get those artifacts in any other well constructed site; only on Slashdot.
What's more, they occurred right after they fixed the white-on-white-comment-title CSS bug. Although it could certainly be a Firefox rendering issue, it seems to me more of a broken CSS issue from Slashdot web developers.
Just as that other annoying bug, I can work around it by clicking the "CHANGE" button without making any threading changes. Which offers another suspicious clue: why is the page rendered differently at that point?
Then a few years later we end up wondering how come our software now sucks ten times more ram than before despite no corresponding quantum leap in functionality.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
It matters a lot in thin client scenarios. You want as many users as possible on the same server. Importantly, you want idle sessions to be friendly to the system by releasing as much memory as possible.
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.)
Summing the memory usage of all the Chrome processes is probably not the correct thing to do, as the memory usage indicated most likely includes shared libraries. I can't say this for sure about Vista, but on all sane operating systems, each shared library is loaded only once into memory, and then shared among different running programs.
If you're measuring memory in a multi-process application like Google Chrome, don't forget to take into account shared memory. If you add the size of each process via the Windows XP task manager, you'll be double counting the shared memory for each process. If there are a large number of processes, double-counting can account for 30-40% extra memory size.
To make it easy to summarize multi-process memory usage, Google Chrome provides the "about:memory" page which includes a detailed breakdown of Google Chrome's memory usage and also provides basic comparisons to other browsers that are running.
For 30 tabs, you can actually get a lot more than that. If the base libraries and the shared code for chrome itself are counted 30 times, then that can easily double the amount of memory, or more. I also looked for that in the article and the author states he summed the memory for all processes, which is to say that the stats for Chrome are wrong. This would also apply to IE, had he been successful at collecting any.
Also, the Firefox memory, and most likely all the others, are wrong, too, because Firefox ends up using up memory that never gets released normally when you use JavaScript applications. Simply opening tabs and summing memory usage is an idiotic way to measure memory usage of a browser.
In short, you should try to find someone competent to run your memory benchmarks.
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.
When using more than 10 tabs or so, my memory usage is...
Yes, I notice when I have a huge number of tabs open with a mixture of Flash and other multi-media running, my browser slows down too. Wonder why that is...
The author says he didn't included IE 8 because there was no way to start it without opening a new window for every invocation!
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.
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.
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
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday June 21, @01:50AM (#28408463)
I am sure that this is true for all of the browsers, but in Opera's case...
The machine has 4GB in question and Opera is set to "automatic" for the memory cache (default). According to this [avencius.nl] article, this instructs Opera to use up to ~10% of the system memory. This is quite tunable based on the environment, so one could easily optimize for a low-end machine and have satasfactory performance. The browser using the memory effectively is the more interesting test, which this benchmark fails to determine. An interesting detail in the graphs is how sharp the memory reclaim cycles are, where the smoother indicates better memory management. The graphs indicate that Opera does a good job in this regard.
Wow, I *wish* I could get Firefox 3.5 to use so little memory! As I write this Firefox is using 1821M VIRT, 944M RES...and I only have 23 tabs open! Firefox memory usage has always been abysmal for me. Does Firefox perform drastically differently on Linux than on Windows? I would be quite horrified if it actually performed better on Windows, but I don't understand how it possibly managed to be so low...I've never seen Firefox use less than.5G with even a few tabs open for a while... I realize my personal experience involves extensions, plugins and other things which suck of RAM, it still seems terribly high for me. If I leave it running for several days, it will peak 2G and I have to restart the browser.
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.
What the hell is up with Slashdot's CSS? I keep seeing images all over the comments (the bars used on the new comments section, the relationship icons). Is anyone else seeing them. I'm using Firefox 3.5.
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.
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.
Exactly. I think I've su'd once in the last month, and that was yesterday to mount a ram disk to use as the Firefox disk cache. That was a nice tip BTW, significant speedup in page loads and UI responsiveness.
mount -t tmpfs -o 'size=100M' tmpfs/path/to/chosen/mountpoint
Create an about:config preference called browser.cache.disk.parent_directory with a string value of/path/to/chosen/mountpoint.
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.
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.
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.
Wow stop feeding this troll. LOOK AT HIS NAME. How can you not see this? I can't believe he got modded up, probably because there's some windows fanboys around, or just those idiots who believe every troll that jumps out and says "in MY experience!"
Firefox runs all its tabs in one process, whereas IE8 creates a new process for each one. So if you have one tab open in FF and one in IE, then IE might be smaller (FF is about 130mb and IE about 60). But each new "tab" (not really, it's a new process so may as well be a new window or instance of the program) in IE is another 30-60MB, but each new tab in FF adds a negligible amount of memory usage.
Open five tabs in each, tally up the usage from all the IE processes, and then compare.
The report doesn't consider plugins, which are the things that I think most people identify with Firefox feeling bloated or memory heavy. Vanilla Firefox may very well be light on memory, but once you load in a handful (or a few dozen) of your favorite plugins, the tests may not turn out the same.
Keep in mind, I am not attempting to imply that the results would certainly be worse, just that they are currently unknown to us and that it's something that needs to be considered.
Finally, this should stop perennial "firefox is a memory hog" trolls. Hopefully.
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.
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.
If you are trying to explain the mechanism to a layman, you need to steer clear of terms like "processes" and "threads" as part of the explanation.
Imagine the memory in your computer is like a housing development. At first, there is a lot of open space. The open space can be partitioned so that houses can be built. Each of those houses represents a process. As long as you have more space, you can build more houses.
Inside each house, you have rooms. In computer terms, these would be threads. Each room has a specific job - kitchen, bedroom, bathroom. Sometimes you need more rooms, so you have to build them. This may mean that the size of the house needs to grow, and the amount of acreage the house needs must grow with it.
As long as a house exists, it will continue to occupy the space it is on. In computer terms, the process will hold on to the memory it has already claimed. However, the corollary to this is that when the house is torn down, all the land it occupied is returned to the "free acreage".
If a room is remodeled, it will not result in a change to the actual house size. Adding more rooms will always take up more land, but removing those rooms doesn't change the occupied land size at all.
In the same way, a process can grow and grow, but as soon as it completes (you close a tab in the browser), the memory will go back to the operating system so other processes can use it. But if the process does not complete because it uses threads to build those same tabs, then the process will continue to take up that memory.
Also consider that a house may burn down. If a problem happens in one room, a house-wide emergency may erupt. A fire in the kitchen may engulf the entire house and bring it down.
In a perfect world, what happens in one house should not affect other surrounding houses. If one house burns down, the other houses around it should be fine. Same with processes. If a thread in one process crashes, it may bring down the whole process. However, since processes are separated from each other, other processes should not be affected.
Then why use threads at all? Why not use processes all the time, since they are clearly safer. Well, why don't we only have one room in our house? Threads are needed within processes to perform important roles. Also, since they all exist in the same process, they can share information (like using light switches downstairs to control lights in the foyer). So a careful combination of threads and processes are necessary to create any kind of meaningful application. There is no right or wrong answer, but Google seems to think that isolating each browsing experience from another is the right way. Firefox thinks that putting all the rooms in one house and simply growing the house is the right way. Everyone is different.
This is a false dichotomy. Most software that uses less RAM is actually also faster.
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.
That's simply not true on modern computers. The CPU is often idle - it's starved for data, with the bottleneck being the buss that feeds it (RAM, generally). Add to this the fact that reading neighboring areas of DRAM is a much faster than randomly reading spots in in memory spread across whole megabytes (or gigabytes, even).
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.
It's great that in the future Firefox might be better, but here and now, the latest stable version is 3.0.11, and while Firefox has many redeeming qualities, speed, memory usage and general performance is not one of them.
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)
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.
IE8, huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (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"
Re: (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.
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?
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Re:Moving targets (Score:5, Funny)
FF3 is plenty good enough for me to thoroughly enjoy an episode of 'Burn Notice' on Hulu just now on that very computer.
Wow! FF3 must be a fantastic piece of software if it can make Burn Notice watchable.
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Re:Moving targets (Score:5, Funny)
Baiting Slashdotters is much like shooting fish in a barrel, the trick is to find the right ammunition, from then on it's childs play.
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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.
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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.
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Re:It doesn't matter (Score:4, Informative)
The symptoms are not identical on all three browsers but none of the three has been working like it used to do.
Although it does seem like it's been better the last day or two.
I usually have
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Re:It doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
Be glad you are not using Konqueror 3.5.10 or 4.2.4; /. makes a point of breaking rendering on those browsers every few weeks.
Random buttons and scroll-bars? Check.
Black text on black background? Check.
Utterly broken navigation so you can watch the front page and nothing else? Check.
CSS, Javascript and other crap in _plain text mode_? Check.
The only reason I keep coming back here for is the friendly discussion style ;)
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Re:It doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
I see weird-ass icons and bars on Slashdot comments in Firefox, on Mac OS X 10.5.7 and Windows XP SP2. I don't get those artifacts in any other well constructed site; only on Slashdot.
What's more, they occurred right after they fixed the white-on-white-comment-title CSS bug. Although it could certainly be a Firefox rendering issue, it seems to me more of a broken CSS issue from Slashdot web developers.
Just as that other annoying bug, I can work around it by clicking the "CHANGE" button without making any threading changes. Which offers another suspicious clue: why is the page rendered differently at that point?
-dZ.
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Of course not... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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Re:It doesn't matter (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.)
Chrome stats probably erroneous (Score:5, Informative)
Summing the memory usage of all the Chrome processes is probably not the correct thing to do, as the memory usage indicated most likely includes shared libraries. I can't say this for sure about Vista, but on all sane operating systems, each shared library is loaded only once into memory, and then shared among different running programs.
Re:Chrome stats probably erroneous (Score:5, Informative)
The Chromium Blog [chromium.org] says:
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Re:Chrome stats probably erroneous (Score:5, Informative)
For 30 tabs, you can actually get a lot more than that. If the base libraries and the shared code for chrome itself are counted 30 times, then that can easily double the amount of memory, or more. I also looked for that in the article and the author states he summed the memory for all processes, which is to say that the stats for Chrome are wrong. This would also apply to IE, had he been successful at collecting any.
Also, the Firefox memory, and most likely all the others, are wrong, too, because Firefox ends up using up memory that never gets released normally when you use JavaScript applications. Simply opening tabs and summing memory usage is an idiotic way to measure memory usage of a browser.
In short, you should try to find someone competent to run your memory benchmarks.
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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: (Score:3, Funny)
When using more than 10 tabs or so, my memory usage is...
Yes, I notice when I have a huge number of tabs open with a mixture of Flash and other multi-media running, my browser slows down too. Wonder why that is...
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: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
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Invalid bechmark (Score:5, Informative)
I am sure that this is true for all of the browsers, but in Opera's case...
The machine has 4GB in question and Opera is set to "automatic" for the memory cache (default). According to this [avencius.nl] article, this instructs Opera to use up to ~10% of the system memory. This is quite tunable based on the environment, so one could easily optimize for a low-end machine and have satasfactory performance. The browser using the memory effectively is the more interesting test, which this benchmark fails to determine. An interesting detail in the graphs is how sharp the memory reclaim cycles are, where the smoother indicates better memory management. The graphs indicate that Opera does a good job in this regard.
Low Firefox Memory Usage (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, I *wish* I could get Firefox 3.5 to use so little memory! As I write this Firefox is using 1821M VIRT, 944M RES...and I only have 23 tabs open! Firefox memory usage has always been abysmal for me. Does Firefox perform drastically differently on Linux than on Windows? I would be quite horrified if it actually performed better on Windows, but I don't understand how it possibly managed to be so low...I've never seen Firefox use less than .5G with even a few tabs open for a while... I realize my personal experience involves extensions, plugins and other things which suck of RAM, it still seems terribly high for me. If I leave it running for several days, it will peak 2G and I have to restart the browser.
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.
Offtopic, what the hell is up with Slashdot's CSS? (Score:4, Informative)
What the hell is up with Slashdot's CSS? I keep seeing images all over the comments (the bars used on the new comments section, the relationship icons). Is anyone else seeing them. I'm using Firefox 3.5.
Regards
elFarto
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well, and here's mine, after half a day of heavy usage:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
8745 root 20 0 267m 106m 22m S 9.3 10.6 2:38.87 firefox-bin
5242 root 19 -1 334m 24m 8540 S 1.3 2.4 0:36.26 X
5405 root 20 0 37520 11m 8408 S 0.0 1.1 0:01.16 xfdesktop
5400 root 20 0 19468 10m 6964 S 0.0 1.0 0:02.72 xfce4-panel
5398 root 20 0 18600 9272 6696 S 0.0 0.9 0:00.80 xfwm
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Funny)
Firefox...as root...REALLY?!
You should be ashamed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Re:Finally... (Score:4, Informative)
Firefox runs all its tabs in one process, whereas IE8 creates a new process for each one. So if you have one tab open in FF and one in IE, then IE might be smaller (FF is about 130mb and IE about 60). But each new "tab" (not really, it's a new process so may as well be a new window or instance of the program) in IE is another 30-60MB, but each new tab in FF adds a negligible amount of memory usage.
Open five tabs in each, tally up the usage from all the IE processes, and then compare.
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Re:Finally... (Score:4, Informative)
Keep in mind, I am not attempting to imply that the results would certainly be worse, just that they are currently unknown to us and that it's something that needs to be considered.
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Re:Finally... (Score:5, Informative)
Finally, this should stop perennial "firefox is a memory hog" trolls. Hopefully.
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.
You're the one trolling.
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Re:Finally... (Score:4, Funny)
Firefox mem usage is 271,480 MB
Wait, why are you running firefox on a supercomputer?
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Re:Finally... (Score:4, Funny)
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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.
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Re:What is process architecture? (Score:5, Informative)
If you are trying to explain the mechanism to a layman, you need to steer clear of terms like "processes" and "threads" as part of the explanation.
Imagine the memory in your computer is like a housing development. At first, there is a lot of open space. The open space can be partitioned so that houses can be built. Each of those houses represents a process. As long as you have more space, you can build more houses.
Inside each house, you have rooms. In computer terms, these would be threads. Each room has a specific job - kitchen, bedroom, bathroom. Sometimes you need more rooms, so you have to build them. This may mean that the size of the house needs to grow, and the amount of acreage the house needs must grow with it.
As long as a house exists, it will continue to occupy the space it is on. In computer terms, the process will hold on to the memory it has already claimed. However, the corollary to this is that when the house is torn down, all the land it occupied is returned to the "free acreage".
If a room is remodeled, it will not result in a change to the actual house size. Adding more rooms will always take up more land, but removing those rooms doesn't change the occupied land size at all.
In the same way, a process can grow and grow, but as soon as it completes (you close a tab in the browser), the memory will go back to the operating system so other processes can use it. But if the process does not complete because it uses threads to build those same tabs, then the process will continue to take up that memory.
Also consider that a house may burn down. If a problem happens in one room, a house-wide emergency may erupt. A fire in the kitchen may engulf the entire house and bring it down.
In a perfect world, what happens in one house should not affect other surrounding houses. If one house burns down, the other houses around it should be fine. Same with processes. If a thread in one process crashes, it may bring down the whole process. However, since processes are separated from each other, other processes should not be affected.
Then why use threads at all? Why not use processes all the time, since they are clearly safer. Well, why don't we only have one room in our house? Threads are needed within processes to perform important roles. Also, since they all exist in the same process, they can share information (like using light switches downstairs to control lights in the foyer). So a careful combination of threads and processes are necessary to create any kind of meaningful application. There is no right or wrong answer, but Google seems to think that isolating each browsing experience from another is the right way. Firefox thinks that putting all the rooms in one house and simply growing the house is the right way. Everyone is different.
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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.
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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.
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Firefox: 3.0.11 (Score:4, Informative)
It's great that in the future Firefox might be better, but here and now, the latest stable version is 3.0.11, and while Firefox has many redeeming qualities, speed, memory usage and general performance is not one of them.
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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)
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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.
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