Chrome 11 is such a hog | Hacker News Reader

Chrome 11 is such a hog

cubic-m.blogspot.com

11 pointsadib11 comments

Well my Chrome folder in C:\Users\simon\AppData\Local\Google is 1.66GB, the application being 323MB of it, so I suppose its a bit of a space hog.

But I don't see the problem with large memory use. Ideally, all of your memory should be put to use all of the time, otherwise it is wasted, no? Shouldn't we be complaining that browsers aren't using more of our 4,6,8,12,16 gigs of RAM?

It won't be a problem if Chrome is the _only_ app that you run.

In my case, its not.

80M instead of 40M? When 24,000M costs $300, who gives a flying fuck about 40 megabytes?

(Yes, yes, this attitude has ruined the software industry. Fine, use your slow but conservative-of-nearly-infinite-resource browser.)

I think the real benchmark is still "which one is faster"? Typically, a faster program will use less memory. But, if Chrome is trading large memory usage for CPU cycles/cache coherency then its perfectly acceptable by me.. just don't slow me down

> Typically, a faster program will use less memory.

The "typical" time for space tradeoff says otherwise. Exceptions abound of course, but I haven't seen your assertion hold up over the vast majority of algorithms.

That's a simplified test case. "Normally" Chrome would eat up 300+MB, which is a lot since I have _other_ applications running.

So I had to try it on my machine with 4 GB RAM.

For context, I already had opened Thunderbird, Sunbird, IRC, Skype, Pidgin, a twitter client, Audacious, an OpenOffice document and a spreadsheet, GIMP with 4 large and scribbled on photos, and a good number of terms and gvims.

Then I opened Chrome 11. And started opening tabs. After opening 101 tabs (really) spanning 3 windows, I gave up. I had it down to 110 MB physical RAM remaining, but it was slow going. These were real web content tabs of all different pages, not empty tabs. The system in general was still completely responsive, though Chrome was taking about 0.5 seconds to switch tabs as opposed to the normally instantaneous response.

So... whether Chrome 11 is a hog really seems to be somewhat system dependent. I do grant it's a significant download compared to the other browsers.

I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that Safari uses more native Apple libs than Chrome, and those libs are resident already for the most part. This might account for your differences.

When Chrome updates it keeps the version you upgraded from in Google Chrome.app > Contents > Versions. I've been removing them whenever I've upgraded and found no problems with doing so.

You're right. Although there isn't a way to remove it from the screen.

The last time I restarted Chrome for an upgrade, it freed up about 4 GB of swap. That's one large browser.

Do anyone really care if a browser is 50mb or 200mb? Its not like you are having multiple installations of it. Every laptop you buy these days comes with about 250gb harddrives. Maybe delete some of your porn if you dont have 200mb for one of the best web browsers out there

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