Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage

#31

Post by s3graham » Mon, Jun 22, 2009, 2:23 AM UTC

tdoggette wrote: post #30

s3graham wrote: post #12

Private bytes or address space? Shared readonly counted twice? I happily suffer Chrome's stupid tab design and lack of Flash (on Ubuntu) for much better end-to-end performance, whether it takes up more memory or not.

Why don't you like Chrome's tab design? I was a little off-put when I first saw it, but it makes sense for tabs to live at the top edge of the screen from a Fitt's Law perspective: when you move your mouse upwards to interact with the browser, it's to deal with tabs (so they deserve the larger target). When you want to hit the address bar, you hit ctrl+t to get a new tab in which it's already selected.

Tabs have always seemed like a horrible misfeature to me. The OS already provides a taskbar, so now you've created N*M places to look. Not only that but you can't see all the tabs at the same time once there's multiple windows, so you have to pick a window, check all of its tabs, move to the next and repeat. The "it's like MDI/documents/text editors" argument is bogus because the window that contains gmail has nothing to do with the window that contains HN, or reader.google, or whatever. It's like all the programs written in C++ get their own taskbar, separate from the ones written in VB, separate from the ones written in JS. Except we only separate the JS ones for some reason.

For Chrome specifically:

1) it lacks the option "New pages should open in [X] a new window [ ] a new tab" compared to Firefox, which makes tabs ignorable.

2) On Windows, I'd much rather they follow the OS conventions for MDI rather than make up their own "cool"/"clever" one (see media/audio players, for some random reason). All of a sudden, for example, you can't double-click in the top left to close. Well, way to be clever, but that's crap.

Re: Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage

#32

Post by snprbob86 » Mon, Jun 22, 2009, 2:30 AM UTC

s3graham wrote: post #31

tdoggette wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you like Chrome's tab design? I was a little off-put when I first saw it, but it makes sense for tabs to live at the top edge of the screen from a Fitt's Law perspective: when you move your mouse upwards to interact with the browser, it's to deal with tabs (so they deserve the larger target). When you want to hit the address bar, you hit ctrl+t to get a new tab in which it's already selected.

Tabs have always seemed like a horrible misfeature to me. The OS already provides a taskbar, so now you've created N*M places to look. Not only that but you can't see all the tabs at the same time once there's multiple windows, so you have to pick a window, check all of its tabs, move to the next and repeat. The "it's like MDI/documents/text editors" argument is bogus because the window that contains gmail has nothin…

The lack of top-left corner double-click drove me nuuuuts. Until I found out that you could middle-click to close tabs.

Re: Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage

#33

Post by blasdel » Mon, Jun 22, 2009, 3:09 AM UTC

chops wrote: post #11

During the experiment, 384 memory checkpoints were taken, which amounts to 1152 seconds or 19.2 minutes. My problem with Firefox has always been with having the browser open for a long time (days) and running multiple tabs, including having an open Gmail window constantly. By that point, Firefox is always sluggish and painful. Closing the browser the natural is a waste of time because it takes so long for the memory…

I haven't had the problem of sluggish old Firefox processes for years -- because it crashes on me at least 10 times per week.

Re: Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage

#34

Post by ori_b » Mon, Jun 22, 2009, 4:14 AM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #26

ori_b wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the memory is used by other programs when I want to start them up. Don't get me wrong, caches are great. However, it's one thing for the OS to cache stuff, because it can easily drop caches when memory pressure rises. Userspace software in current systems have no good way of knowing the memory pressure, and no good way of responding to it by dropping caches to free up memory. (yes, an API for "thi…

an API for "this memory is a droppable-at-any-time cache" would be nice in OSes, but it doesn't exist at the moment Naive question: would this be any better than letting applications provide swapping hints to the OS? And is that any better than just letting the OS swap based on usage?

Oh, another big problem is that you need to actually write the data you're swapping out to disk. You can't just drop it on the floor whenever memory pressure is high; You have to wait for the disk so spin up, seek, write, and so on.

What you really want is to be able to tell the OS "I don't care if this data goes away. If you need space, don't bother taking time to save it, I can regenerate it quickly."

Re: Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage

#35

Post by midnightmonster » Mon, Jun 22, 2009, 4:32 AM UTC

Chromium dev list discusses these results: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/th...

TLDR: Vista's default memory readout is actually pretty good for simply adding together like this and getting reasonable numbers WRT shared libs. Chrome really does use tons more memory than FF 3.5 with simple pages in many tabs. Chrome devs chose stability, security and foreground tab prioritization over lower mem use on purpose. They don't think this test much reflects what people actually do with their browsers.

Re: Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage

#36

Post by chops » Mon, Jun 22, 2009, 4:55 AM UTC

bmj wrote: post #20

chops wrote: post #11

During the experiment, 384 memory checkpoints were taken, which amounts to 1152 seconds or 19.2 minutes. My problem with Firefox has always been with having the browser open for a long time (days) and running multiple tabs, including having an open Gmail window constantly. By that point, Firefox is always sluggish and painful. Closing the browser the natural is a waste of time because it takes so long for the memory…

Are you using the latest FF 3.5 release candidate? I noticed this issue with previous versions, but it seems like the latest RC is much better.

I am. And granted its memory management is getting better with each release (memory usage improved greatly from 2 to 3). Admittedly, I haven't had 3.5 RC long enough for a very extensive experience. I'm speaking primarily of FF3, which for me could get quite painful even switching tabs (especially with Gmail open on one tab). It could be better, but 3.5 RC has only been out a few days. At first, I loved the shit out of FF3, but after a while, I found myself getting furious (at least working on my laptop; on my desktop, which is a beastly gaming machine, I don't have nearly as many complaints).

Re: Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage

#37

Post by Tichy » Mon, Jun 22, 2009, 6:26 AM UTC

ori_b wrote: post #22

chops wrote: post #11

During the experiment, 384 memory checkpoints were taken, which amounts to 1152 seconds or 19.2 minutes. My problem with Firefox has always been with having the browser open for a long time (days) and running multiple tabs, including having an open Gmail window constantly. By that point, Firefox is always sluggish and painful. Closing the browser the natural is a waste of time because it takes so long for the memory…

I agree. Closing firefox through file->quit takes at least 30 seconds for me, during which I can hear the laptop's fan spinning up. Usually I just kill -9 it because I don't have the patience to wait. Firefox 3.0.11, on a dual-core low-voltage laptop with 1 gig of ram. It's fast enough to run everything I care about but firefox.

Could be some plugins rather than FF itself?

Re: Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage

#38

Post by bmj » Mon, Jun 22, 2009, 10:26 AM UTC

chops wrote: post #36

bmj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using the latest FF 3.5 release candidate? I noticed this issue with previous versions, but it seems like the latest RC is much better.

I am. And granted its memory management is getting better with each release (memory usage improved greatly from 2 to 3). Admittedly, I haven't had 3.5 RC long enough for a very extensive experience. I'm speaking primarily of FF3, which for me could get quite painful even switching tabs (especially with Gmail open on one tab). It could be better, but 3.5 RC has only been out a few days. At first, I loved the shit out…

I found the same problem with FF3, which prompted me to try the 3.5 releases.

Re: Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage

#39

Post by JulianMorrison » Mon, Jun 22, 2009, 11:27 AM UTC

ori_b wrote: post #22

chops wrote: post #11

During the experiment, 384 memory checkpoints were taken, which amounts to 1152 seconds or 19.2 minutes. My problem with Firefox has always been with having the browser open for a long time (days) and running multiple tabs, including having an open Gmail window constantly. By that point, Firefox is always sluggish and painful. Closing the browser the natural is a waste of time because it takes so long for the memory…

I agree. Closing firefox through file->quit takes at least 30 seconds for me, during which I can hear the laptop's fan spinning up. Usually I just kill -9 it because I don't have the patience to wait. Firefox 3.0.11, on a dual-core low-voltage laptop with 1 gig of ram. It's fast enough to run everything I care about but firefox.

C/C++ programs that manually memory free at exit are doing it wrong.

They ought to (1) write everything to disk they need to save (2) fsync (3) send themselves a SIGKILL. The OS will tidy up the memory.

Re: Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage

#40

Post by ori_b » Mon, Jun 22, 2009, 3:50 PM UTC

Tichy wrote: post #37

ori_b wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Closing firefox through file->quit takes at least 30 seconds for me, during which I can hear the laptop's fan spinning up. Usually I just kill -9 it because I don't have the patience to wait. Firefox 3.0.11, on a dual-core low-voltage laptop with 1 gig of ram. It's fast enough to run everything I care about but firefox.

Could be some plugins rather than FF itself?

It's possible, I suppose, but I seem to remember that it happened long before I added any extensions (I don't have very many - 2 or 3 of the more popular ones like adblock and firebug). I guess it wouldn't hurt to experiment again.