I reboot my laptop as infrequently as possible – which means that I keep Firefox running for weeks without restarting. At least, I would prefer to. But the longer it runs, the more memory it gobbles. The only way to reclaim it is to restart.<\/p>\n
So when I read about the tab-isolation feature in Googles new Chrome browser which uses a separate process for each tab, it peaked my interest. I installed Chrome and tried a very quick (and not very scientific) test, as described below.<\/p>\n
Firefox had been open for a few days and currently had 8 tabs open. I am sure many tabs had been opened and closed in the time it had been running. It was consuming 138M of memory according to Task Manager.<\/p>\n
I started Chrome and opened the same 8 URLs. Going back to Task Manager and adding up the memory usage of the 9 Chrome processes resulted in 152M consumed. I’m sure that closing and re-opening Firefox would have resulted in less that the 138M of RAM that I mentioned earlier. So, as many have predicted, the memory usage in Chrome is much higher than Firefox.<\/p>\n
Next I tried closing 5 of the 8 tabs in Firefox. Memory consumption, as expected, barely moved – dropping only to 132M and reclaiming 4.3% of the total memory allocation. Closing the same 5 tabs in Chrome reduced memory usage to 86M – reclaiming 43% of the total memory used.<\/p>\n
This is enough evidence for me to conclude that the tab\/process isolation model would work well for my typical usage. I don’t envision abandoning Firefox (or the wealth of available plugins) anytime soon. But I’ll be keeping a close eye on the progress Google makes with Chrome.<\/p>\n
I hope to find time for a more rigorous (and scientific) test in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I reboot my laptop as infrequently as possible – which means that I keep Firefox running for weeks without restarting. At least, I would prefer to. But the longer it runs, the more memory it gobbles. The only way to reclaim it is to restart.
\nSo when I read about the tab-isolation feature in Googles new Chrome browser which uses a separate process for each tab, it peaked my interest. I installed Chrome and tried a very quick (and not very scientific) test, as described below.
\nFirefox had been open for a few days and currently had 8 tabs open. I am … Continue reading »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[10,12,11,14,13],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-browsers","tag-browser","tag-chrome","tag-firefox","tag-memory","tag-performance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webperformance.com\/load-testing-tools\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webperformance.com\/load-testing-tools\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webperformance.com\/load-testing-tools\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webperformance.com\/load-testing-tools\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webperformance.com\/load-testing-tools\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.webperformance.com\/load-testing-tools\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71,"href":"https:\/\/www.webperformance.com\/load-testing-tools\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions\/71"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webperformance.com\/load-testing-tools\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webperformance.com\/load-testing-tools\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webperformance.com\/load-testing-tools\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}