I switched back to Firefox over a year ago and I have not noticed it using much less RAM than Chrome tbh. It’s definitely the better browser for all the other reasons, but I wouldn’t list memory utilization as a big advantage over other browsers
The whole RAM thing is way overblown. Both browsers request a lot of RAM allocation, but only actually use a fraction of it. When the OS needs it for another process this “allocated, but unused” pool is the first to get used when “Free and unallocated” is gone
Problem is windows reports it all as the same in the task manager so people see that “70%” usage and freak out.
There’s also the idea that free RAM is somehow a good thing. In an ideal system, the RAM would always be “full” of potentially useful data. Having a bunch of empty RAM means that it’s not being useful. That space could be used to hold plenty of regularly used files that would be instantly loaded instead of having to pull from the drive again.
I don’t know when everyone started getting concerned with RAM usage, but in a perfect system, it would hold onto all of your frequently used programs and files that it could fit from boot and then those would load instantly.
Some Linux distros even allow loading the entire OS into RAM for wild speeds.
Idle RAM is just that. It does you no favors. Now, I do understand that you don’t want to be completely out, but we act like having 80% free is a goal for some reason.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. It consumes the exact same amount of power whether there’s useful data in it or not. Any self-respecting operating system will fill up RAM that applications aren’t using with frequently accessed files, so they’re ready to go in an instant.
The problem is that the extra RAM used by a browser is held on an exclusive basis and so is not nicely reclaimable by the kernel. I love that Linux caches the shit out of files in RAM, it’s great. It’s also great that it can release that memory when I launch a chundering dumpster fire application that eats all of my RAM. If a browser had been holding that memory, then the godawful Linux OOM killer would have launched, halted all threads on the system, walked the entire process tree, and SIGKILLed something (probably not a browser tab) before letting everyone else resume.
With the way memory is currently managed, a bloated browser is a liability. Cached state needs to be stored in something like a mmaped file so that the kernel can flush pages out of memory if someone else comes along with a malloc. Alternatively, there needs to be communication between a browser and a userspace OOM daemon. If the system started hitting a soft limit, then the browser could start unloading background shit more aggressively.
Free memory is wasted memory, but so is memory that can’t be used for anything else when it’s needed.
Yeah, I agree. Browsers all seemed to act like they are the only thing running on the computer at some point, practically resembling their own OS with the amount of containerization and complexity. There should definitely be a way for the OS to request some RAM be released from the browser.
I switched back to Firefox over a year ago and I have not noticed it using much less RAM than Chrome tbh. It’s definitely the better browser for all the other reasons, but I wouldn’t list memory utilization as a big advantage over other browsers
The whole RAM thing is way overblown. Both browsers request a lot of RAM allocation, but only actually use a fraction of it. When the OS needs it for another process this “allocated, but unused” pool is the first to get used when “Free and unallocated” is gone
Problem is windows reports it all as the same in the task manager so people see that “70%” usage and freak out.
Tl:Dr Windows task manager is a fuckin lier.
There’s also the idea that free RAM is somehow a good thing. In an ideal system, the RAM would always be “full” of potentially useful data. Having a bunch of empty RAM means that it’s not being useful. That space could be used to hold plenty of regularly used files that would be instantly loaded instead of having to pull from the drive again.
I don’t know when everyone started getting concerned with RAM usage, but in a perfect system, it would hold onto all of your frequently used programs and files that it could fit from boot and then those would load instantly.
Some Linux distros even allow loading the entire OS into RAM for wild speeds.
Idle RAM is just that. It does you no favors. Now, I do understand that you don’t want to be completely out, but we act like having 80% free is a goal for some reason.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. It consumes the exact same amount of power whether there’s useful data in it or not. Any self-respecting operating system will fill up RAM that applications aren’t using with frequently accessed files, so they’re ready to go in an instant.
The problem is that the extra RAM used by a browser is held on an exclusive basis and so is not nicely reclaimable by the kernel. I love that Linux caches the shit out of files in RAM, it’s great. It’s also great that it can release that memory when I launch a chundering dumpster fire application that eats all of my RAM. If a browser had been holding that memory, then the godawful Linux OOM killer would have launched, halted all threads on the system, walked the entire process tree, and SIGKILLed something (probably not a browser tab) before letting everyone else resume.
With the way memory is currently managed, a bloated browser is a liability. Cached state needs to be stored in something like a
mmaped file so that the kernel can flush pages out of memory if someone else comes along with amalloc. Alternatively, there needs to be communication between a browser and a userspace OOM daemon. If the system started hitting a soft limit, then the browser could start unloading background shit more aggressively.Free memory is wasted memory, but so is memory that can’t be used for anything else when it’s needed.
Yeah, I agree. Browsers all seemed to act like they are the only thing running on the computer at some point, practically resembling their own OS with the amount of containerization and complexity. There should definitely be a way for the OS to request some RAM be released from the browser.