The resource usage of browsers is an important aspect in modern-day computing, because the browser is taking on an ever more important role in day-to-day computing tasks. Hence, it may come as no surprise that many complaints regarding browsers are not about rendering speed or rendering quality, but about resource usage. Dot Net Perls ran an interesting benchmark on Windows Vista SP1, comparing 5 browsers to each other.
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Member since:2007-09-18
Member since:2005-10-13
I didn't really care too much about the RAM issue either, but it's a no-brainer that using less RAM in these cases is better for 99.99999% of people.
From what I gather, FF3 just releases a bunch of caches after certain timeout periods are reached - so that background tabs stop caching stuff you aren't likely to use for hours anyway. CPU's are so insanely powerful these days that it might only take 5ms to recreate the caches when needed, and that's unnoticeable. Meanwhile, if that data was kept in memory and got swapped out to the hard drive it might make the whole system slow.
So yes, FF3 exchanges memory for increased CPU usage. But it isn't a problem because the CPU usage is still virtually nothing unless you're running on an i386, and I imagine your performance in those situations isn't going to be great anyway due to other bottlenecks besides the released caches.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2008-06-25
Personally I WANT my browser to use more memory. When you have 2GB or 4GB of RAM, the amount of memory the browser uses is nearly irrelevant.
In fact, I would RATHER the browser keep more cached information in RAM so that I can access it near-instant. If the browser, like FireFox 3, constantly releases memory back to the system, that means 2 things:
1. More CPU cycles (to calculate what to release)
2. More wait time if something you want to see was released from memory.