Monday, March 7, 2011

Memory Growth - FireFox vs. Chrome


This is very quick and silly test you can try to analyse on the memory usage of Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Used environment
  • Firefox 3.6.9
  • Google Chromium 7.0.517
  • Ubuntu 10.04

Method
  • Choose a list of 10 random very frequently used web pages which consisting a mixture of dynamic and static content. 
  • Then measure the memory growth due to each new tab in both browsers.
  • During the test, a snapshot of cumulative memory growth due to new tab was measured using operating system level resource statistics.
  • Memory overhead due to add-ons was added to "Empty Tab" column.



2 comments:

Unknown said...

chromes claim to fame besides its javascript performance was the isolation between tabs, so this kind of fairly linear growth is pretty much expected right?

cde said...

Question : have you correctly distinguished between "total virtual size" and "resident size" ?

(As in : you *are* showing resident size here, right ?)

(see http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/analysis.html )