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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

And they're still at it, too: https://areweslimyet.com/

Maybe I'm misreading things but it looks like it's been constantly getting worse since 2012?

There's more and more features every month. Add that to the various performance improvements (that can take a hit on the ram, dependending on how they're implemented), and it becomes a bit more understandable why you would see such an increase.

Interesting choice of words, you would think "performance" improvements would make things better, not worse...

I do get what you're saying though.

They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.

Except mobile hardware which does not. Power usage is always a concern.

>Except mobile hardware which does not.

Source?

RAM available in mobile phones seems to grow exponentially [1]. Power efficency of processors also seems to grow exponentially [2] (does anybody have a source for ARM processors?).

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/AWkmMJc.png (note logarithmic scale) [2]: https://www.karlrupp.net/2013/06/cpu-gpu-and-mic-hardware-ch...

Power usage has little to do with memory usage. In fact, if the browser is using more RAM as a cache, it won't hit persistent storage as much, which actually increases battery life.

Browser are caching web content, not much persistent storage content... and the OS does persistent storage caching fine, typically no need to try to add your own (poor) layer to do that.

If that exaggerated RAM use causes other more intensive apps and their data to be evicted, that can cause a much more significant load when the app has to spin up again and re-acquire or re-calculate its state.

The extra chips are not free. What we are seeing is bringing up the latest low power tech into the phones for now. Except RAM has hit maximum densities per chip already or is very close.

Remember that RAM has to be powered on for every refresh cycle...

It is "nothing" compared to screen or radios, but it is there. So you won't be seeing more than one Dram chip in there, footprint notwithstanding.

memory bandwidth matters too, not just size

Not only is this false, but completely ignores troves of older hardware existing in people's homes that has to run browsers just as well.

The average consumer hardware improves at nowhere near exponential rate (although I guess it depends on the timescale and your willingness to fudge the graph to sparse data points).

>completely ignores troves of older hardware existing in people's homes that has to run browsers just as well.

The performance has gotten worse for users of a computer from 2006, but it has improved for users of ten-year old computers (since a ten-year old computer in 2012 would have been from 2002). If you assume that a computer is less likely to be used the older it gets (and that this rate is roughly stable), then I am not ignoring older hardware at all.

>although I guess it depends on the timescale and your willingness to fudge the graph to sparse data points

thus is the nature of all real-live long-term trends. If you pick a sufficiently small timeframe, they never work.

> The performance has gotten worse for users of a computer from 2006, but it has improved for users of ten-year old computers

I'm not sure I follow that logic.

I'm saying that the performance of today's firefox on 2006 hardware is better than the performance of 2012's firefox on 2002 hardware. I consider that to be a better measure than to compare both releases on 2006 hardware.

Thanks, makes much more sense stated this way, I also didn't initially understand your point.

Thanks for clarifying. If you know anyone willing to donate 2002 era hardware, I'd be willing to do some tests and benchmarks.

I used a 2006 laptop until the beginning of this year and prior to that has a 2000 desktop. Can confirm.

Hardware does not get exponetially better. Maybe it did in 90ties and 00ers. Right now hardwardware gets slimmer, less power consuming and cheaper. But not better. My 12 year old (then mid-end gaming pc) is pretty much exactly as fast as my current, 2(?) year old office machine. (x264 and other mulit-threaed cpu benchbmarks) But it costs a fraction and uses next to no energy.

/edit: Yes this is wrong. I made a mistake. My "gaming" desktop is "only" 8 years old. It has a 4 core AMD processor. It's on par with current atoms.

Love the redundancy of "90ties", but what's the etymology of "00ers"?

Augts?

But then, following the pattern it'd be 00ts or 00ghts...

two-thousanders? Not sure if anybody actually says that

I pronounce "00ers" as "zeroes"

Maybe it should be "00es"?

Noughties

Your 12 years old pentium 4 (or whatever) likely has 1 core and 1 thread, which is immensely noticeable even compared to the lower end modern 2 cores/4 threads machines (let alone 4/8 mid level modern desktops).

That's impossible. My 200$ is faster than your 12 year old computer.

That's impossible. My 200$ phone is faster than your 12 year old computer.

An extremely low-energy atom, that runs at half the frequency might have about the same performance as a top-of the line 12-year old Pentium 4, but that's not a meaningful comparison in my eyes, considering that we still have high-end gaming PCs today.

A 11 year old Pentium 4 @3.4GHz has a passmark score of 401. A modern 2-core $40 Celeron G1840 @2.80GHz has a passmark score of 2984. And that's among the cheapest processors you can get as end-user.

1: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+4+3.4...

2: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+G1840...

>that's not a meaningful comparison in my eyes, considering that we still have high-end gaming PCs today.

It is meaningful when you consider what the average user is purchasing. Back then you had to purchase good stuff to run the latest office apps, etc. It was common that the only thing needed to get a friend into the gaming world was the purchase of a graphics card. Now most casual users do not have anything close to what is offered in high-end gaming PCs.

Right now buying anything that doesnt have an atom gets you a literal monster. I've had a "decent" laptop (entry level i3 and entry level discrete AMD spits with disgust GPU) from 2010 and anything for the same price in 2016 will get you an order of magnitude more powerful machine

My hardware doesn't improve exponentially. In fact, my current work laptop has less memory (8G) than my previous one (16G) or previous desktop machine (also 16G). And it mostly works with Chrome, but I stopped using Firefox because my habit of opening dozens of tabs led to stratospheric memory usages that killed even 16G machines. That was somewhere in 2013, looks like it's even worse now?

> I stopped using Firefox because my habit of opening dozens of tabs led to stratospheric memory usages that killed even 16G machines

I don't think that's representative of how Firefox works. I used Firefox similarly in 2013 and didn't see those problems; the users supported by my company, mostly on 4GB machines, also didn't see them.

I have a 112 tabs open right now and Firefox has been running for a couple of weeks, which means thousands more have been opened and closed. It's using 4 GB of memory (EDIT: Which is more than usual, but it's fine with me).

Agree with you here - this is essentially the reason that I don't use Chrome on my desktop (aside from brief testing, or to load up something quickly that requires Flash).

Firefox is still a lot better at RAM and CPU usage when hundreds of tabs are present in the browser. This persists when using e10s.

I see your 112 and raise you a 875. FF worked just fine that too with just a less than 1 GB of RAM. I had to block flash, hand tune some of the cache sizes and have a tab uloader etc. No other browser seemed capable of handling my rather <cough> unique <cough> use case.

If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing that you have 875 tabs open? How are you able to keep track of what you opened, and where etc? I tend to feel anxious and unfocussed when I've got over a dozen or so open - at which point i'll dump some "I'd like to read this" articles into a bookmarks folder which I work through in my down-time, and clean out periodically.

I would like to spend some words saying how good is the tab-unloading thing.

I have an extension that basically unloads a tab (I guess it freezes the state and serializes it to disk) and frees its ram.

It works very well, so well I'd love to use it on my phone too.

Mind sharing the name of the extension? I have a similar usage pattern with hundreds of tabs of open and would find it useful. Thanks.

There are extensions that can search the body of the open but out of view tabs.

I have commented at length why I use so many open tabs. Basically that's my cache-to-do-list. Once I revisit certain tabs enough times they get upgraded to a bookmark. What bookmarks don't do well but tabs do marvelously is preserve the trajectory and context of how I arrived at the page. Very useful to recreate the state when I visit it later.

Firefox has gotten much more stable over recent years in regards to having excessive amounts of tabs open. I can have over 300 tabs open and it's stable (I was using Waterfox when doing this in Windows though).

I have over 300 saved tabs in Firefox on my desktop, and it is stable, but I notice it runs quite a bit slower than when I only have a few open. I really need to start closing some tabs here and there...

It only loads the actual tab when you activate it though, so I don't think all the tabs are being stored in memory, just the ones you activate during a session. I probably actually load about 30 or so during a session, with many more being opened, looked at then closed.

Tab Mix Plus FTW!

What has Waterfox so special? I skimmed it's homepage but it only says "we're fast!", doesn't explain how and why though.

At the time I was using it (about a year ago) it was essentially a 64 bit build of Firefox.

> my current work laptop has less memory (8G) than my previous one (16G)

That indicates really poor buying decisions! I'm curious about why would this happen.

That you for your evaluation of my buying decisions! With absolutely no information except one data point about memory side you were able to conclude they were bad, this is remarkable. Has nothing to do with the point in question (that memory capabilities aren't nearly growing exponentially, not lately) but still very remarkable insight.

I assumed your workplace made the decision and not you. Sorry for appearing to criticize your decisions. I'm still curious why you downgraded to a machine with less memory.

Because they don't make Macbook Air with more memory. 8G is the maximum.

But this renders your original point moot. Memory is still growing, you just chose a lower end laptop. Obviously you would see it decrease. For me, my previous laptop had 8GB and the current one has 16GB. Exponential increase.

Getting worse at displaying the same webpage, while actual webpages become heavier. Here I am with 6 opened tab and 800mb of RAM taken by Firefox.

Actually hardware has regressed, because most traffic is from mobile devices.

The FAQ says:

TP5 loads 100 popular webpages, served from a local webserver.

I don't know if that means the test pages are up-to-date copies of real-world pages or not. On one hand, real-world pages have certainly been getting heavier, and it would bear mentioning if that fact was not reflected in this test. On the other hand the graph becomes really hard to interpret if the test suite isn't a constant.

The actual pageset appears to live on build.mozilla.org[1], but is down atm (for me at least). The actual list of pages is on the areweslimyet github repo[2].

[1]https://build.mozilla.org/talos/zips/tp5.zip

[2]https://github.com/mozilla/areweslimyet/blob/a42e69eaac4c764...

It seems like it would be a really good idea if they also displayed a line for a baseline version of Firefox, holding the version constant so you can see how the webpages have changed.

You are misreading given that there were big improvements in memory measurment and some of the memory use increase you notice are just firefox measuring better it's own memory

Where are those improvements reflected in the graph?

Well..AWSY started a few years ago and many things happend to firefox since then. I cannot tell you exactly what increase corresponds to a memory measurment improvement but i can point you to the blog of Nicholas Netherote https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/

it makes sense though as more features are in use on the set of tested pages, these will inevitably use more ram.

its good to monitor and ensure that stays within acceptable parameters though, and potentially improved upon again. at least the gain is pretty slow since they "fixed all the stuff"

IIRC, the set of tested pages are a static snapshot; I don't think the machines have general internet access (because that would lead to spurious failures when the other end has problems, which is annoying as that means nobody can check in code).

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