Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

prerender.cloud

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 236 posts

Re: Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

#171

Post by sargun »

dirkg wrote: post #169

Chrome can't even begin to compare to Firefox when it comes to handling anything >10 tabs, which is I think what 99% of people max out at, so Chrome doesn't bother about the rest even though people have been begging for years. - no multiple tab rows - when you launch, it reloads every single tab vs loading only the active one (the only sane option), causing massive slowdown and network traffic - as a result in Firefo…

I have recently been running FF in parallel with Chrome. If I'm using non-Google properties, that don't use bad extensions, I quite like using FF. It's not quite as stable, but it "feels" faster and lighter.

Re: Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

#172

Post by dirkg »

This is only for low memory devices. From the linked article -

"All the improvements discussed above reduce the Chrome 55 overall memory consumption by up to 35% on low-memory devices compared to Chrome 53. Other device segments will only benefit from the zone memory improvements."

Re: Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

#173

Post by hashhar »

dirkg wrote: post #169

Chrome can't even begin to compare to Firefox when it comes to handling anything >10 tabs, which is I think what 99% of people max out at, so Chrome doesn't bother about the rest even though people have been begging for years. - no multiple tab rows - when you launch, it reloads every single tab vs loading only the active one (the only sane option), causing massive slowdown and network traffic - as a result in Firefo…

Firefox easily handles upwards of 50 tabs while Chrome keeps crashing most of the times for me and takes up a lot of load time.

FF extensions are really great compared to Chrome (apart from some Chorome Apps). My only remaining gripe with Firefox is the tab spinning problem (it seems to improve after every new build. I'm on nightly.).

Re: Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

#174

Post by 0xffff2 »

cxseven wrote: post #72
stemcc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAM is one of your least power hungry components compared to other parts of your computer, such as what generates heat (CPU/GPU) or produces physical motion (fans or spinning drives).

Reducing RAM usage will reduce disk activity, though, so there's that.

Why would that be? Unless you're frequently running out of RAM and swapping to disk, RAM usage shouldn't correlate to disk usage much, right?

Re: Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

#175

Post by fulafel »

jcoffland wrote: post #58
ausjke wrote: post #29

awesome news then, chrome really needs to improve memory usage, especially when I have lots of tabs open. under firefox I normally had 120 tabs open all the time, and it's fine. with chrome, I dare not to exceed 60 tabs. chrome triggers heavy swap all the time still, which renders the system very sluggish.

This is mainly because Chrome allocates a process for each page whereas FF only allocates a thread. The important factor being that threads share an address space where processes are allocated their own and thus consume more memory. Separate processes are arguably more secure and of one process crashes it does not take down the whole browser but all this comes at a cost. This cost is very apparent with many tabs open…

The primary security gain of sandboxing is about making it harder for web content to hijack your computer by exploiting security bugs. Many common types of bugs can be exploited to get remote code execution in browsers because of unsafe programming languages used (C/C++).

Both Chrome and Firefox have multi-process sandboxes now, Firefox is a little behind and plans to enable multiple content processes next year.

While Chrome's is more granular, it does share processes between web pages from the same domain so won't start a new one for quite every tab.

Re: Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

#176

Post by dwetterau »

dirkg wrote: post #172

This is only for low memory devices. From the linked article - "All the improvements discussed above reduce the Chrome 55 overall memory consumption by up to 35% on low-memory devices compared to Chrome 53. Other device segments will only benefit from the zone memory improvements."

The "zone memory improvements" however were also significant:

"Figure 5 shows the peak zone memory improvements since M54 which reduced by about 40% on average over the measured websites. "

From: http://v8project.blogspot.ca/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optimizin...

Re: Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

#177

Post by haneefmubarak »

0xffff2 wrote: post #174
cxseven wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing RAM usage will reduce disk activity, though, so there's that.

Why would that be? Unless you're frequently running out of RAM and swapping to disk, RAM usage shouldn't correlate to disk usage much, right?

Because all of that "unused" RAM in the background is actually being used by the OS for disk caching, thus reducing the overall frequency of reads.

Re: Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

#178

Post by JeremyBanks »

johnfn wrote: post #166
barnacs wrote: post #110

Great news! A simple weather website, with about 1 MB worth of actual content (text, markup, images, layout) now only uses 250 MB of memory. And it only takes a few seconds to load on a 100Mbps+ connection whenever I click a menu item (that's with all ads and tracking blocked and most of the stuff already cached). I'm sorry, I just don't see any reason to celebrate.

Come on man, you don't want to be that guy at HN that rains on everyone's parade. A 30% decrease in RAM usage for an app as complex as Chrome is really something to be celebrated. Great work is done piece by piece.

Hacker News wouldn't be Hacker News if it wasn't full of assholes.
Post reply on HN