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Browsers eating RAM

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Re: Browsers eating RAM

#41

Post by powvans »

tpetry wrote: post #19

https://chromeisbad.com/ I did not have time yet to schow whether the claims are true but i found this when searching why i have insanely high windowserver cpu activity. Seems chrome on mac is heading into a strange direction. For normal browsing i use safari since a long time as the battery will last the longest compared to firefox and chrome. But the chrome developer tools are so damn good i can‘t get rid of it for…

I stumbled on this site last week and anecdotally I can confirm that disabling Keystone helps. I was driven to find answers after no longer being able to hear people on Zoom calls because of the fan noise from my 16" MBP. I got sick of having to wear noise cancelling headphones when Chrome and Zoom turn my laptop into a space heater.

The Keystone thing though, it's not a panacea. It seems to fix the issue with WindowServer running away with the CPU, but Chrome is still pretty terrible. I decided to just deal with the switching cost and stopped using Chrome altogether. It has made all the difference. Switched to Firefox and I'm not looking back.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#42

Post by iainmerrick »

superkuh wrote: post #15

Any multi-process browser is going to be an extreme RAM hog. Any JS-engine priority browser is going to be a CPU hog. Modern web browsers are not browsers, they are bloated virtual machines with a bit of browser tacked on. If you want a browser for the web instead of a JS virtual machine you have to look backwards, not forwards.

Safari has a very decent JS engine, so I don’t think that’s the problem.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#43

Post by perryizgr8 »

The bigger problem is that Macbook fans are incredibly noisy. Fan noise is a non-issue on most other laptops. I do agree that chrome is highly unoptimized. Sometimes I wonder if the Chrome team themselves use it as their main browser or not.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#44

Post by londons_explore »

Chromes multiprocess model and arena memory allocators have a massive impact on memory use... But they are also a big security win.

Any browser with a small memory footprint you should ask yourself "if someone manages to find a buffer overflow in this thing, will my bank password be sitting adjacent in memory because the memory allocator is trying to save RAM rather than being security conscious"?

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#45

Post by taf2 »

Let’s please remember it’s a trade of space and time... memory vs cpu... I see safari using a lot more cpu then chrome and also being much less responsive when using complex sites... both engines are mature these are trade offs

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#47

Post by Jyaif »

taf2 wrote: post #45

Let’s please remember it’s a trade of space and time... memory vs cpu... I see safari using a lot more cpu then chrome and also being much less responsive when using complex sites... both engines are mature these are trade offs

There's also the security tradeoff. If you put everything in a single process you save a ton of RAM at the expense of security.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#48

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

Jyaif wrote: post #47
taf2 wrote: post #45

Let’s please remember it’s a trade of space and time... memory vs cpu... I see safari using a lot more cpu then chrome and also being much less responsive when using complex sites... both engines are mature these are trade offs

There's also the security tradeoff. If you put everything in a single process you save a ton of RAM at the expense of security.

Safari appears to use a separate process for each tab.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#49

Post by Jyaif »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #33

> I reached a point where I could barely hear the podcast I was trying to listen to. That's how loud the fan was. > focuses mainly on memory usage I mean I get it, Chrome is not the most efficient browser out there and Safari is more efficient in terms of memory and power usage. I'd probably use Safari as my daily browser if I didn't depend on Chrome's dev tools. What's the tradeoff though? Usually you sacrifice memo…

Security and stability is an other tradeoff: isolating code by running it in separate processes has a cost both in terms of memory and CPU.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#50

Post by deanclatworthy »

The whole browser situation at the moment is so incredibly frustrating. I will NOT browse the internet without a fully-fledged adblocker - no pihole is not enough.

This means pretty much only using Firefox - but I have about 10 tabs open at the moment, each using over 500mb of ram while idle. What on earth they are doing I don't know... and I find it very sluggish when playing video.

Chrome is my daily browser, even after they limited the number of rules that ublock origin can use. But it grinds to a halt on my top of the range macbook pro and uses 100% cpu if I open a couple of twitch streams and 20-30 other tabs.

Safari is a joy to use, much better on battery but webextension implementation means ublock origin is not possible.

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