Browsers eating RAM • Hacker News Board

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#61

Post by neogodless » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

deanclatworthy wrote: post #50

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…

I went to check my Firefox memory usage on Windows 10 (two tabs, extensions include ublock, facebook, bitwarden, contrast and multi-account containers) but I saw something unexpected.

https://imgur.com/a/UJnV7ak

Adding up the RAM totals 671.7MB on a 16GB device. But why do I have one Firefox with 4 sub-processes, and 3 (no 4) additional lone Firefox processes? I think the 4 background processes must be extensions in sure, but then what is the primary process with 4 sub-processes when I only have two tabs?

Without extensions, it looks like the browser is using about 280MB.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#62

Post by dotdi » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

llimllib wrote: post #56

deanclatworthy wrote: post #50

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…

I prefer ubo, but have found adguard very tolerable for browsing with Safari

+1 for AdGuard. I picked up a lifetime license a while ago but I was sceptical. Now I have it installed on my iOS devices and on my Mac. Working fine.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#63

Post by deanclatworthy » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

llimllib wrote: post #56

deanclatworthy wrote: post #50

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…

I prefer ubo, but have found adguard very tolerable for browsing with Safari

Adguard is an electron app that runs in the background of your machine. I found the whole idea of that apalling and uninstalled it.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#64

Post by rank0 » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

snet0 wrote: post #58

roblabla wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely can allocate memory without using up any backing resources. On Linux (which is where I have experience, but I assume macos works similarly), even after mapping some memory, it won't be backed by any physical memory (e.g. RAM) until you actually write there. And you can mmap files into your address space, meaning you can place a huge file you can access through memory, but it's not actually taking any R…

So can you allocate more memory than what is available in this way?

Yup! Processes see/use virtual memory, not the literal physical RAM address spaces. The kernel maintains mappings between virtual-physical and will allocate/free physical memory as needed. All of this is invisible to the process.

Pretty neat huh?

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#65

Post by dahart » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #11

Don't have a Mac so can't look into it but can anyone confirm this test is actually right? E.g. Brave claims (I don't use Brave I just know they had this claim) Safari is worse for memory usage https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology... while this product that uses Safari claims it's 10x better. Obviously both claims can't be true. From what I remember with Edge (pre Chromium) and Firefox I'm goi…

Chrome does use a lot of memory, but I’m extremely skeptical of this blog post’s methodology and results. Does it seem realistic to have 54 different real web pages open that total under 1GB? (If they’re opening tiny fake pages, this test is misleading and useless.) Most real web sites transfer several megabytes on load. CNN.com loaded 4.2MB for me. Amazon.com loaded 4.3 MB. That’s just the data transfer of compressed assets. The images and content have to be uncompressed and rendered, which takes a lot more memory.

I’m playing on a Mac right now and see nothing like what is reported here. When I open cnn.com in Safari, that tab alone takes 1GB. Chrome reports far less usage than that.

Also “Real Memory” is not the same as active memory in RAM, it’s not necessarily giving a complete picture. Memory can allocated but unused or compressed or paged out.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#66

Post by deanclatworthy » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

neogodless wrote: post #61

deanclatworthy wrote: post #50

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…

I went to check my Firefox memory usage on Windows 10 (two tabs, extensions include ublock, facebook, bitwarden, contrast and multi-account containers) but I saw something unexpected. https://imgur.com/a/UJnV7ak Adding up the RAM totals 671.7MB on a 16GB device. But why do I have one Firefox with 4 sub-processes, and 3 (no 4) additional lone Firefox processes? I think the 4 background processes must be extensions in…

I don't think you can compare Windows Vs Mac when it comes to FF. There have been countless complaints about FF mac performance over the years - even after they supposedly fixed it all.

15 FF tabs open currently: https://ibb.co/MRkJjwY

- 1 outlook email tab - 1-2 custom web apps for dev work - the rest are jira and gitlab

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#67

Post by londons_explore » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

eklitzke wrote: post #59

londons_explore wrote: post #44

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"?

What is the security win you get from arena allocators?

By making sure each type of C++ object is allocated in an arena, then many memory safety issues (use after free, buffer overflow) can only impact objects in the same arena. In Chromium land, they're called Partitions.

That means an attacker has to find some memory safety issue and some code execution issue in the same object. They can't corrupt memory using one flaw and then get code execution by forcing another type of object to be allocated at the same place.

Learn more here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/dcc13470a/t...

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#68

Post by mattkevan » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

Had the misfortune of having to do a FB messenger video call with Chrome yesterday. Chrome and Facebook with one window open brought my 2020 Intel MacBook to its knees.

Activity Monitor showed windowserver at about 50% CPU usage, Chrome at another 40%.

I thought Teams was enough of a hog, but clearly FB is worse.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#69

Post by larrysalibra » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

hundchenkatze wrote: post #46

felixding wrote: post #7

Wanted to learn about flotato after reading the post but the hamburger menu doesn't work on Firefox mobile...

It doesn't work in Firefox desktop either. I guess they only test with webkit based browsers.

The hamburger menu doesn’t work on iOS Safari either!

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#70

Post by jdashg » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

neogodless wrote: post #61

deanclatworthy wrote: post #50

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…

I went to check my Firefox memory usage on Windows 10 (two tabs, extensions include ublock, facebook, bitwarden, contrast and multi-account containers) but I saw something unexpected. https://imgur.com/a/UJnV7ak Adding up the RAM totals 671.7MB on a 16GB device. But why do I have one Firefox with 4 sub-processes, and 3 (no 4) additional lone Firefox processes? I think the 4 background processes must be extensions in…

If you take a profile (perfht.ml) it'll show you the names of the processes as part of the profiling report.