
Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54 - jotto
https://www.prerender.cloud/blog/2016/12/03/chrome-memory-54-vs-55
======
ikeboy
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.

~~~
wamatt
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.

~~~
ikeboy
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.

~~~
wamatt
Good catch. All the quoted memory figures are for _private_ memory.

The _shared_ memory figures in the session test (10 tabs and 15 extensions)
were all at 0 in both Chrome 55 and 54.

~~~
ikeboy
Oh it's the other way around for me. Shared are around 50mb for each
extension.

------
dirkg
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.

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

------
barnacs
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.

~~~
ksec
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.

~~~
happycodework
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..)

~~~
Arelius
But Chrome doesn't use bitblt afaik. It's GPU composited, which does support a
number of tile-level compression formats.

------
niij
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.

~~~
sillysaurus3
You can run `curl wttr.in` to get your local weather and 3-day forecast.

Or just go to [http://wttr.in/](http://wttr.in/)

~~~
kbenson
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.

~~~
SiVal
TO THE DEVELOPER, FWIW: I'm also in California and it thinks I'm in the
Philippines in a town with the same name as one a few miles from here. I
assume you use IP to find town, country; throw away country; look up town in a
list with country names in alphabetical order (Philippines < United States)

Note that even if you get the country right it won't be enough, because there
is a "Springfield" in each of the 50 states. You'll have to get keep all of
the location info you get from the IP lookup, not throw part of it away and
attempt to recover it.

~~~
sillysaurus3
As a workaround, you can use your zip code instead. E.g.
[http://wttr.in/90401](http://wttr.in/90401)

~~~
kuschku
Doesn’t work with German ZIP codes:
[http://wttr.in/24107](http://wttr.in/24107) or ISO ZIP codes:
[http://wttr.in/D-24107](http://wttr.in/D-24107)

~~~
nkkollaw
Why would it work with German zip codes? Zip codes are not universal...

~~~
saghm
Because there are people in Germany who want to get the weather?

~~~
swiley
I think his point is that there would be collisions with every other country
so it could only concivably work with one countries zip codes.

~~~
ygra
Well, the country prefix solves the collision problem, after which it's just a
data problem.

------
ausjke
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.

~~~
curiousgal
120 tabs?! What for?!

~~~
wiredfool
Tabs are the new bookmarks.

~~~
sker
They're better. If I bookmark something with any service, chances of me ever
checking that out again drop to nearly zero.

Tabs, by virtue of being there bugging you, are bookmarks, to-do lists, and
task reminders all in one.

~~~
truth_sentinell
No, they aren't. I don't know about you, but I can't have more than 20 tabs
open and consciously be aware of the content. I can't think of people like
above, having 120 tabs. It's probably a waste of time and resources. First
because you can't possibly hold in your memory 120 tabs, thus you'll have to
visit them or read the title to remind you why is it there on the first place.
With bookmarks at least you can use the search bar...

So it ends up being counterproductive.

~~~
xorxornop
Naw, at least with me I seem to be able to by treating the tab ordering as a
conceptual discovery ordering. That is, I remember what things I learned /
researched prior to and following each tab. It's lossy, but because each has a
unique relationship with its surrounding concepts there's plenty of
opportunities for parity-like behaviour; redundancy.

When researching a thing I'll open up some high level page about it, then do
breadth-first searches of tab contents, opening up new tabs whenever I see
something that looks interesting, has wider implications, or possibly has some
weaker relationship to a thing with one or both of those properties and I
think I might be able to traverse the concept graph this way to find it /
them.

So I end up with a sort of flat tree where it corresponds almost directly to
my earlier thought graph which produced them. I can work with maybe 200 this
way... But not more. Unless I open them in different windows - sometimes
different browsers, actually, to help further differentiate/compartmentalise
them (eg. I'll use this strategy for largely disparate topics). Then, well,
I'm not sure where I top out, all I can say is I once crashed my box from out
of memory (not running swap), and it's a 32GB box soooo... I dunno.

There are likely many others that work this way. Perhaps it's not common, but
I also feel that it's very unlikely unique!

~~~
truth_sentinell
You gave me an idea to a chrome plugin to manage tabs. I'm gonna open ne some
tabs to learn how to write plugins.

------
Tempest1981
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
Perhaps close them.

~~~
madeofpalk
I'm assuming that was already though of.

------
smegel
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!

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

~~~
DiabloD3
I _think_ their installer detects what Windows you are on and installs that,
now; but I could be wrong.

~~~
blinkingled
Yes I have installed Chrome on W10 on few machines and always got the 64-bit
version automatically.

------
dirkg
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
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...](http://v8project.blogspot.ca/2016/10/fall-cleaning-
optimizing-v8-memory.html)

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

~~~
stemcc
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.

~~~
hemancuso
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.

------
spacehacker
How does this compare to Firefox?

~~~
hashhar
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.

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

~~~
jansenv
poorly

------
tbrock
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.

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

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

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

It's 2016.

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

~~~
edblarney
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.

------
rjain15
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

~~~
raarts
Do you have a link for that?

~~~
DCoder
[https://v8project.blogspot.com/2016/12/v8-release-56.html](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
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.

------
known
[http://www.seamonkey-project.org/](http://www.seamonkey-project.org/) uses
less CPU

------
olegkikin
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.

~~~
dexwiz
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...](http://techdows.com/2016/10/fix-chrome-54-looks-zoomed-in.html)

~~~
noinsight
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.

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

------
chrija
My own tests confirm these numbers.

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

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

------
gf263
does this help the battery life in any way?

~~~
stemcc
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
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.

~~~
ptaipale
Well, it makes sense to me: CPU and GPU take in the order of 10 times as much
power as RAM. RAM power usage just isn't depending on load, like that of CPU
and graphics.

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

~~~
Exuma
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/back-to-
backspace/...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/back-to-
backspace/cldokedgmomhbifmiiogjjkgffhcbaec?hl=en-US)

~~~
MrQuincle
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!

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

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

[http://v8project.blogspot.ca/2016/10/fall-cleaning-
optimizin...](http://v8project.blogspot.ca/2016/10/fall-cleaning-
optimizing-v8-memory.html?m=1)

------
piotrjurkiewicz
> heap snapshot 87 KB 85 KB 3%

Are those really kilobytes? Not megabytes?

