Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

https://www.prerender.cloud/blog/2016/12/03/chrome-memory-54-vs-55

by jotto • 10 years ago

385 213 10 years ago

prerender.cloud

chrija• 10 years ago

My own tests confirm these numbers.

RaitoBezarius• 10 years ago

Typo in the title of the article linked : It's not Chome, it's Chrome.

smegel• 10 years ago

Also, if you are not yet using 64-bit Chrome, you really should. It is more stable and avoids internal "out of memory" errors individual tabs can sometimes return. Not the default Chrome for some reason!

Exuma2• 10 years ago

It's the default on Mac, not sure on windows.

wyclif• 10 years ago

I'm curious why this is the case. You'd think if Google wanted 64 bit Chrome to be the default, they'd do it on both platforms even if only for consistency's sake.

DiabloD3• 10 years ago

I think their installer detects what Windows you are on and installs that, now; but I could be wrong.

hemancuso2• 10 years ago

Anyone have any perspective as to whether these gains will flow to Electron?

stemcc2• 10 years ago

If they didn't, then that would mean development on Electron had stopped. Or that the Electron team needs to remove these features in their fork, and considering how much grief Electron's RAM usage gets, I don't see that happening.

hemancuso2• 10 years ago

The notes suggested a lot of the gains were targeting low memory environments so it wasn't immediately clear if it was a win in all dimensions.

richdougherty2• 10 years ago

The underlying changes are in V8, so you'll see them in Electron too.

https://v8project.blogspot.co.nz/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optim...

wfunction2• 10 years ago

[edit: removing comment as people made it unreadable anyway.]

Exuma2• 10 years ago

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/back-to-backspace/...

MrQuincle• 10 years ago

It's not so relevant to the conversation about memory, but is indeed a feature that has been removed.

If you want to have a single key on Linux representing going back again, I would recommend not to overload the backspace, but pick a key you don't need.

On my system F7 I never use, so it's perfect for this purpose.

$> xmodmap -e 'keycode 73 = XF86Back F7 F7 F7'

Or persistent:

$> keycode 73 = XF86Back F7 F7 F7 >> ~/.xmodmap

I hope I save you all a lot of keystrokes in the future!

jessaustin• 10 years ago

Or get a chromebook: there's a nice "back" button at the top left next to "esc". There are also some nice "forward" and "reload" buttons.

gf263• 10 years ago

does this help the battery life in any way?

Alex3917• 10 years ago

No, if anything the energy impact looks worse than before on OS X. I love Chrome, but the fact that it's almost completely unusable on laptops that aren't plugged in is problematic.

stemcc2• 10 years ago

RAM is one of your least power hungry components compared to other parts of your computer, such as what generates heat (CPU/GPU) or produces physical motion (fans or spinning drives).

Bud• 10 years ago

This makes no sense. RAM generates heat just as CPU does, and RAM also actually does consume a substantial percentage of laptop power. However, said usage isn't related to how much RAM is being used, really; it's a constant usage rate to keep the current RAM state alive.

cxseven• 10 years ago

Reducing RAM usage will reduce disk activity, though, so there's that.

richdougherty2• 10 years ago

Hard to know. Lower memory usage will generally help battery usage, but it sounds like the garbage collection is more aggressive now, which might offset the savings.

greglindahl• 10 years ago

If you avoid swapping because of it, yes.

niij2• 10 years ago

They mentioned that weather.com crashed their website. Their website is always extremely slow for me as well. It's ridiculous how poorly designed their website can be for such a simple service.

oxide• 10 years ago

I use weather.gov instead for precisely this reason.

wfunction2• 10 years ago

It doesn't even have sunrise/sunset? Or am I just missing it? (I use Weather Underground.)

sillysaurus32• 10 years ago

You can run `curl wttr.in` to get your local weather and 3-day forecast.

Or just go to http://wttr.in/

ausjke5• 10 years ago

tried that, how handy!

kfrzcode2• 10 years ago

I love this webservice. Nothing else to add, just my love.

BatFastard2• 10 years ago

Awesome! Kudos. Now if they could sneak in an animated weather map...

fsasieta• 10 years ago

you have changed my life

Cyph0n5• 10 years ago

Can we get the temperature in degC?

kbenson• 10 years ago

Hmm. "Weather for City: Santa Rosa, Philippines"

That's the wrong Santa Rosa, in the wrong country. There's an interesting bug in there somewhere.

niij2• 10 years ago

Thanks for the helpful link!

vikrantvm• 10 years ago

This is great. Hope the dev fixes location detection! Weather from the terminal, woot

robertcorey• 10 years ago

neat, thanks for the tip.

ausjke5• 10 years ago

weather.com uses drupal7 + apache2 + ubuntu + angularjs, not sure why it is that slow, I use weather.com once a while just fine though.

true_religion• 10 years ago

It is only because of AngularJS + Ads.

This is a slow down caused by browser rendering/parsing/JS execution. I'm not sure what the server operating system would have to do with it.

radicalbyte• 10 years ago

1. Install uMatrix. 2. Allow *.mapbox.com on weather.com 3. Enjoy a fast and useful site.

Same trick works for many sites, particularly old media (TV, newspapers, content spam etc).

codegeek• 10 years ago

Also, there is https://weather.gov

Cyph0n5• 10 years ago

It does not seem to support TLS, so: http://weather.gov

abrowne2• 10 years ago

Even better, weather.gov/ZIP e.g. http://weather.gov/55455

hackuser• 10 years ago

Try Weather Underground: Their graph is the most impressive, useful visualization of weather data around, IME. For example:

https://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast...

Note you can click the controls at the top right of the graph and add/remove elements. The graph is a bit heavy, but that may be necessary to generate the visualization.

BatFastard2• 10 years ago

What I didn't realize was that weather underground is now owned by the weather channel :(

dattaway• 10 years ago

Weather Underground also has a lightweight telnet service. Telnet to rainmaker.wunderground.com and enjoy the super fast ascii text interface.

spacehacker2• 10 years ago

How does this compare to Firefox?

hashhar2• 10 years ago

Not that great. Chrome still crashes beyond 50 tabs and/or eats up a lot of CPU slowing the system while I easily have 150 tabs on FF.

leeoniya• 10 years ago

from my testing, there's also a bit of a dip in js perf. maybe due to GC aggressiveness tweaks.

ausjke5• 10 years ago

awesome news then, chrome really needs to improve memory usage, especially when I have lots of tabs open.

under firefox I normally had 120 tabs open all the time, and it's fine. with chrome, I dare not to exceed 60 tabs. chrome triggers heavy swap all the time still, which renders the system very sluggish.

curiousgal2• 10 years ago

120 tabs?! What for?!

setq• 10 years ago

I do this. It's a curse. I don't know why.

wiredfool• 10 years ago

Tabs are the new bookmarks.

spacehacker2• 10 years ago

I personally use tabs like a desktop with all kinds of papers, documents and books flying around. Sort of like this:

https://s15.postimg.org/dpq7mpmaz/messydesk.jpg

Theodores• 10 years ago

Sometimes I open 100 or so tabs to do repetitive stuff I cannot code, data entry work that won't be easily automated or needs the human touch, e.g. updating a product catalogue. On top of the 10-50 tabs open that gets to be a lot of heavy pages but makes for an efficient workflow. With hot keys and 'close all tabs to the right' I can quickly get through a lot of stuff that needs attention to detail and focus to get done.

All I am saying is that there are situations when a lot of tabs is the best option given the circumstances, e.g. lots of data entry work.

thejay• 10 years ago

I too keep a lot of tabs open. I use OneTab and The Great Suspender chrome extensions to also keep memory usage under control. They've been indispensable tools for the tab hoarders like me.

ausjke5• 10 years ago

great, did not know this, I do use clutter-free extension all the time which avoids the same URL on multiple tabs.

ilaksh• 10 years ago

Exactly. Its hoarding. So eventually they will have to build in features to protect hoarders from themselves.

jcoffland• 10 years ago

This is mainly because Chrome allocates a process for each page whereas FF only allocates a thread. The important factor being that threads share an address space where processes are allocated their own and thus consume more memory. Separate processes are arguably more secure and of one process crashes it does not take down the whole browser but all this comes at a cost. This cost is very apparent with many tabs open.

robotresearcher3• 10 years ago

processes are allocated their own and thus consume more memory.

Copy-on-write means this needn't be a large overhead. Only pages that change after forking are duplicated.

fulafel• 10 years ago

The primary security gain of sandboxing is about making it harder for web content to hijack your computer by exploiting security bugs. Many common types of bugs can be exploited to get remote code execution in browsers because of unsafe programming languages used (C/C++).

Both Chrome and Firefox have multi-process sandboxes now, Firefox is a little behind and plans to enable multiple content processes next year.

While Chrome's is more granular, it does share processes between web pages from the same domain so won't start a new one for quite every tab.

kilroy123• 10 years ago

I can't recommend this extension enough, The Great Suspender:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

It freezes your tab after a set amount of time, freeing up the memory for each tab.

raarts2• 10 years ago

And it's also a huge battery saver.

nazri1• 10 years ago

My laptop has no ssd. This sluggishness brings back memories of linux trashing the swap partition when it ran out of memory back in the early 2000s. Quite understandable since back then most people don't have that much RAM (64Mb?). Nowadays I have 8Gb on my laptop and I run linux with swap disabled. The only disk trashing that I'm having nowadays is due to chrome, and it's definitely not due to swap but the effect is almost the same - at best the laptop is unusable for up to 30 seconds, at worst, I have to do a hard reboot because that's the only way to recover - I can't even switch to a new terminal to kill chrome. Attempts to log in via the tty console (Ctrl+Alt+F2) in order to kill chrome is futile. I could enter the username, but the password prompt took forever to appear. Most of the time it expires after 60 seconds. If I manage to enter the password, the shell prompt can take forever to appear.

Nowadays I do a "killall chrome; sleep 2; killall chrome" whenever it starts to trash the disk and giving me the bad vibe.

kofejnik• 10 years ago

put chrome cache on a ram disk, helped me a lot last time I had a spinning hdd

weaksauce• 10 years ago

I made a simple firefox/chrome extension for people that horde tabs as temp bookmarks. You might find it useful to find tabs and quickly navigate to them by clicking on the link in the list. It's free and open source. The github page has a gif showing usage. You can also type cmd-shift-e or ctrl-shift-e to switch to it.

Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...

Firefox Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/

source code: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

Let me know if you find it useful or have any suggestions. (patches are awesome too)

sunnyps2• 10 years ago

In Chrome you can press "Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + D" and bookmark all open tabs into a folder. Then you can right click on the folder later to open all those tabs.

reactor• 10 years ago

Better use OneTab extension, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

kfrzcode2• 10 years ago

For the layman web developer with little knowledge of browser internals, how does this compare to Firefox's memory usage?

jansenv• 10 years ago

poorly

ikeboy5• 10 years ago

Wow. My normal session now leaves me with around 8gb free out of 16, compared to 1-2gb free previously. Gmail is using less than 1GB again. I might even disable The Great Suspender, and stop killing tabs that use up lots of memory.

Whoever worked on this, you deserve a raise. QOL improvements for so many people.

bogomipz4• 10 years ago

What is The Great Suspender?

MetaMonk• 10 years ago

Suspends tabs after a set period of disuse. Great for people who open a ton of tabs in Chrome.

skrowl• 10 years ago

It's basically like Bartab Plus for Firefox ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-plus/ ) but for Chrome

dexwiz2• 10 years ago

Are you using Classic Gmail or Google Inbox?

ikeboy5• 10 years ago

Classic. Can't handle inbox on a computer, only in the app.

kyriakos• 10 years ago

Google inbox web app is painfully slow for me

wamatt2• 10 years ago

For me the situation is perhaps not quite as clear cut. On the one hand I'm seeing nice improvements in the large memory hogging tabs. For example a typical reddit thread was reduced from 399 MB down to 295 MB.

On the other hand, it appears all extensions now have a >50MB memory usage floor. For example, the Authy extension was using 5MB under Chrome 54. It's now using 55MB on Chrome 55. Similarly the simple archive.is button extension went from 5MB to 55MB. That's a lot of RAM for spartan functionality.

For the record, I'm using the chrome://system/ page to compare before and after.

That said, it may be possible the additional memory usage for extensions may be a reporting change as opposed to an actual memory increase. Unsure either way.

ikeboy5• 10 years ago

Private versus shared memory from chrome://system. I suspect shared doesn't really matter.

I'm using shift+esc task manager, and top to see overall system free ram.

sunnyps2• 10 years ago

This might be a side-effect of --isolate-extensions (out of process iframes for extensions) being turned on in M55.

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/chromiu...

renaudg• 10 years ago

I quite like OneTab instead of The Great Suspender, more predictable and really straightforward to use : https://www.one-tab.com/

mercer2• 10 years ago

For those who use OneTab I can highly recommend setting a keyboard shortcut for 1) seeing your OneTab list (although that can also be a bookmark), and more importantly, 2) sending the current tab to OneTab.

I had to rediscover how to do this, or OneTab changed in its behavior. You have to go to your extensions screen (Chrome), scroll way to the bottom, and set your shortcuts for extensions there.

Just FYI, as setting extension shortcuts in general wasn't intuitive to me.

geon• 10 years ago

It is sad that I cant really tell if you are being sarcastic.

Sure memory is cheap vs. developer time, but still.

ansgri• 10 years ago

Cannot imagine him being sarcastic:

around 8gb free out of 16, compared to 1-2gb free previously.

1-2gb only left is something that greatly lowers the quality of developer time.

pmlnr• 10 years ago

Gmail is using less than 1GB again

Geez. If that's something we need to be happy about, we're doomed.

amelius• 10 years ago

This sounds too good to be true. Are there any downsides to this improvement?

Waterluvian• 10 years ago

A random 30% of the document and scripts don't load. ;)

edblarney2• 10 years ago

I'm still getting full white and black screens on Chrome 54.

It's 2016.

Rumudiez• 10 years ago

Same thing for me, but only on my 2011 MBP. My girlfriend's 2012 MBP doesn't do it, and neither does my work 2015 MBP. I think it might be related to Chromecast, because that's the only difference between each of those browsers aside from hardware.

Do you have any extensions like that might be causing it?

pitaj• 10 years ago

What do you mean? Have you tried reinstalling? Updating graphics drivers? Turning off hardware acceleration?

edblarney2• 10 years ago

Tried everything except turning off hardware accel.

But that should not be it - because it works fine on startup.

Every once and a while, screen goes black for most pages, even on reload.

Have to restart.

I shouldn't have to tinker to get a web browser to just load pages.

bogomipz4• 10 years ago

I have a question - should the same also be true on the latest Chromium?

hyperdunc• 10 years ago

Chrome and Chromium are essentially the same. In this case the optimizations were made to the V8 JS engine, which is part of Chromium.

piotrjurkiewicz• 10 years ago

heap snapshot 87 KB 85 KB 3%

Are those really kilobytes? Not megabytes?

Tempest19812• 10 years ago

Any way to set the minimum tab width yet? Once I get 7+ tabs in a window, they're truncated to a useless width.

drcross• 10 years ago

Perhaps close them.

madeofpalk• 10 years ago

I'm assuming that was already though of.

isuraed• 10 years ago

Firefox does this.

ksec3• 10 years ago

nope. no tab overflow.

amlib• 10 years ago

If you need that many tabs you should take a look at tree tabs for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-tree/

it's the best thing to have all your tabs stacked on the side of the screen and still fit, alongside with a search bar!

johnp_• 10 years ago

Firefox originally had a preference for that, but they moved it to CSS, so you can modify it via an addon or with userchrome.css:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.tabMinWidth

olegkikin• 10 years ago

It also looks like the UI shrunk 30%, and there's no way to change it, except by changing the DPI of the whole OS.

notyourwork• 10 years ago

I didn't notice any UI change when I reloaded chrome after updating.

dexwiz2• 10 years ago

Previously Chrome did not take computer DPI settings into account. Now it scales the UI with DPI settings. I found my laptop was at 125% scaling without me knowing.

http://techdows.com/2016/10/fix-chrome-54-looks-zoomed-in.ht...

noinsight• 10 years ago

On Linux on my 32" 4K screen Chromium automatically scales to 150% or so and the top chrome is the height of a Coke can.

I have to start the process with "--force-device-scale-factor=1" to make it stop.

patadune• 10 years ago

I got the opposite problem (tabs and address bar were bigger after update), and I fixed it by changing the flag "UI Layout for the browser's top chrome" in chrome://flags from "Touch" to "Normal". Maybe this flag can also fix your problem.

barnacs• 10 years ago

Great news! A simple weather website, with about 1 MB worth of actual content (text, markup, images, layout) now only uses 250 MB of memory. And it only takes a few seconds to load on a 100Mbps+ connection whenever I click a menu item (that's with all ads and tracking blocked and most of the stuff already cached).

I'm sorry, I just don't see any reason to celebrate.

kevindong• 10 years ago

I personally just do a Google search for 'weather' if I want local weather. Otherwise, 'weather <location>'. Very fast and lightweight.

ksec3• 10 years ago

Exactly this. Even though it is not quite 1MB, but more like 5-10MB including all the images.

But requiring 250MB of memory, AND some doesn't even load 60fps smooth on latest machines. At times i wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong with the Web Stack.

laichzeit0• 10 years ago

Console yourself by remembering that the vast majority of people creating these websites don't have computer science degreees. They learned their "trade" over a few weekends. Their "profession" is the equivalent of self-taught backyard abortionists.

happycodework• 10 years ago

Fun fact, even though it's downloaded as compressed format, the windows drawing api bitblt requires bmp format, so it's probably saved in memory as bmp. A 1024x768x24bpp bmp is multiple megabytes, even though the jpeg is 100kb.

(I think..)

vbezhenar• 10 years ago

I think that web stack has its problems, but generally problem is developers (or their managers) who don't care about performance. It's possible to create awesome and performant websites with current web stack.

johnfn• 10 years ago

Come on man, you don't want to be that guy at HN that rains on everyone's parade. A 30% decrease in RAM usage for an app as complex as Chrome is really something to be celebrated.

Great work is done piece by piece.

colechristensen2• 10 years ago

He has a point. For me, most of my 'web' experience isn't doing anything I don't remember doing in 1995. The things websites are doing I usually don't want them to do.

I just want to see text, images, and video with light formatting and hyperlinks. This _doesn't_ require hundreds of megabytes of memory. It would involve restricting what the new web could do and those restrictions would make things better. We don't need the kitchen sink in every page.

agentgt• 10 years ago

Nice... but why is it faster/memory is more important to me. I suppose I could look at the changelog but it would have been nice if the post guessed why.

scott_karana• 10 years ago

JavaScript engine (aka V8) improvements, per the post they linked:

http://v8project.blogspot.ca/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optimizin...

tbrock• 10 years ago

AWS Console went from 284 to < 150 but that was the only tab that broke 100mb. Not sure what all of you with 100s of 250mb+ tabs are doing.

Excited for electron + node to get this improvement.

rjain15• 10 years ago

More exciting news coming in Chrome 56 with complete optimization.. V8 can optimize the entirety of the JavaScript language. Can't wait for Christmas presents

raarts2• 10 years ago

Do you have a link for that?

DCoder• 10 years ago

https://v8project.blogspot.com/2016/12/v8-release-56.html says:

V8 version 5.6, which will be in beta until it is released in coordination with Chrome 56 Stable in several weeks...
Starting with 5.6, V8 can optimize the entirety of the JavaScript language.

desireco42• 10 years ago

That is welcome change, I already switched to Opera and happy with it, but we really need a lot of choices always and that is why I welcome this change.

dirkg2• 10 years ago

Chrome can't even begin to compare to Firefox when it comes to handling anything >10 tabs, which is I think what 99% of people max out at, so Chrome doesn't bother about the rest even though people have been begging for years.

- no multiple tab rows

- when you launch, it reloads every single tab vs loading only the active one (the only sane option), causing massive slowdown and network traffic

- as a result in Firefox you can have 100's of tabs, open the browser, work in a few and close, without affecting anything.

- Firefox had Tab groups, an awesome visual representation, before they made it optional due to everyone copying Chrome's limited feature set.

- Chrome still uses much more memory

- Firefox extensions are by design much more powerful. e.g. Session Manager. And things like Tree style tabs etc.

sargun• 10 years ago

I have recently been running FF in parallel with Chrome. If I'm using non-Google properties, that don't use bad extensions, I quite like using FF. It's not quite as stable, but it "feels" faster and lighter.

hashhar2• 10 years ago

Firefox easily handles upwards of 50 tabs while Chrome keeps crashing most of the times for me and takes up a lot of load time.

FF extensions are really great compared to Chrome (apart from some Chorome Apps). My only remaining gripe with Firefox is the tab spinning problem (it seems to improve after every new build. I'm on nightly.).

imron• 10 years ago

I typically have like 80 tabs open at any time with Firefox - I use them like temporary bookmarks.

dirkg2• 10 years ago

This is only for low memory devices. From the linked article -

"All the improvements discussed above reduce the Chrome 55 overall memory consumption by up to 35% on low-memory devices compared to Chrome 53. Other device segments will only benefit from the zone memory improvements."

dwetterau• 10 years ago

The "zone memory improvements" however were also significant:

"Figure 5 shows the peak zone memory improvements since M54 which reduced by about 40% on average over the measured websites. "

From: http://v8project.blogspot.ca/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optimizin...

known• 10 years ago

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ uses less CPU

Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

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