
Scalability - zobzu
http://gregor-wagner.com/?p=79
======
tytso
Performance is the side-effect, not the cause. The cause is the fact that
chrome uses separate processes both for security, and so if one tab crashes,
you don't lose them all.

The fact that it uses more memory is a design tradeoff (although with shared
text pages it's not as bad as one might think). The real question is whether
you would ever have that many tabs open, and how much memory do you have on
your desktop?

~~~
rmccue
> The real question is whether you would ever have that many tabs open, and
> how much memory do you have on your desktop?

I have 60 tabs open now (in FF), and this is after closing most of them, on a
32-bit system with 4GB of RAM. I regularly hit over 200 tabs when browsing.

~~~
d0m
200 tabs.. how is that possible? Do you ctrl+click on every possible links on
every page?! I'm actually really surprised. I, too, can't stand more than
5-6..

~~~
dspillett
I tend to have several windows with sevaral tabs open for different
categories: things to send to people next time they are online, personal
techie things I intend to read when I get a minute, work related similar, and
so on. Yes I could use bookmarks and such for these, but I find this a more
immediate reminder. Every now and then I scan round these windows and close
off things that have slipped into irrelevance or bookmark ones that I might
still read but maybe not any time soon.

On top of those there are "recent research" for any problems I am currently
working on, which is usually at least one window each with a search results
tab and a few tabs I opened from there (after pruning the ones that were not
relevant in the end.

Plus there are the tabs I am "actively" using (which is pretty much always at
least five at the moment: two mail clients, two social networking sites, and a
page containing the results of various service monitors which updates every
minute or so).

I often see FF taking a bit more than 1Gb RAM particularly if I have complex
pages that auto-update a lot (Zimbra, facebook, so forth) open, though often
closing it and restarting with the "reload last session" option brings that
down by at least 60% (I assume the "extra" is stuff cached in RAM and/or
memory allocated and not yet released due to fragmentation in FF's internal
memory management - both situations being "resolved" by the restart)

~~~
sjs
I can't imagine triaging 200 tabs on any kind of regular basis. Just thinking
about closing that many tabs feels really good. Do it man, get rid of them!
Free yourself! Bookmark things or send to Instapaper/Read it later and archive
things you haven't read in a week. Don't let it pile up. Don't feel obligated
to read or otherwise handle each page.

Maybe you don't feel bogged down but I feel bogged down for you :)

------
narkee
Anyone care to share how their usage patterns lead to having hundreds of tabs
open at a single time? How is it even feasible to find a specific tab without
doing a time consuming linear search?

I rarely have more than 4-5 tabs open at a time, so I'm honestly curious.

~~~
thesteamboat
I must admit to currently having 280 tabs open. In my case, I open a bunch of
things I intend to read (by browsing reddit or the like) and defer the reading
of them indefinitely.

In practice, most of the tabs are `legacy' tabs that I don't use, but which I
still retain some nominal interest in when I go clean out the tabs every
couple months or so. These tabs range from youtube videos that I don't want to
forget, to tips for Vim, Wikipedia articles, blog posts on machine learning,
instructions for DIY haptic compasses...

About 1/3 can be traced to one or two websites with interesting articles that
I intend to read in depth (at some point).

~~~
mun2mun
Your browsing style is very much same as mine. I suppose you are using firefox
with vimperator + tree style tab. If you have a fear of restarting the browser
again then install bartab[1] extension and forget the fear. It unloads the
tabs from memory, so memory consumption is too low and restarting browser
takes little time.

[1]<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab/>

------
mootothemax
It makes me a bit suspicious that a Canary build of Chrome is used. I
understand that when a new feature is highlighted in a nightly build of
Firefox, it's right to show it off - but why not do so against the latest
version of Chrome - or even a Dev build? At least those two have been tested
first ;)

~~~
ootachi
Would you honestly prefer it if browser manufacturers compared pre-release
versions to shipping versions? Seems to me that would be far worse.

~~~
starwed
Well, in this case it should be compared to whichever version of chrome
performed best. That way you include any improvements they've made, but not
any regressions.

------
PanMan
I know an anecdote isn't data, but here we go: I often have >100 tabs open. I
also sometimes have to restart my mac, and reopen those tabs. While Chrome
then struggles for a few minutes, it doesn't take half an hour, like this
article suggests, to open 100+ tabs. And I did switch to Chrome from Firefox,
as it seems to handle a lot of open tabs a lot better.

~~~
unicornporn
for me, the big difference between firefox and chrome is that it isn't a total
usability disaster to handle that many tabs in firefox if you use the tree
style tab ( [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-
ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/) )
extension.

~~~
rmccue
Personally, I find the Panorama feature helps with that, as does having a tab
list. Does Chrome offer either of those?

------
rlander
Recently I've gone back to firefox (8, nightly) because of two issues with
chrome: memory usage and constant crashes (as of lately, on a mac).

I must say that, although I'm a tab freak (I always have around 30 to 50 tabs
and/or windows opened at the same time) it is _very_ fast and never uses more
than 500mb of ram.

The only issue that I have is that it doesn't play well with rescuetime. Other
than that, a delight.

------
petegrif
I figured that around 150 was an unlikely use case but see from the comments
that some people are using approx 100 tabs. I can't imagine doing that. What
kind of real world use cases do people have for such a huge number of tabs?
And how do they navigate efficiently?

~~~
xutopia
I've seen tab enthusiasts. They are incapable of tracking which tab they
already have open and reopen the same one over and over again.

~~~
sgift
Not really, I have about 100 tabs open at the moment and each one points to a
different page. Regarding the "real world usage" for this: Pages I read every
day, pages I've opened and intend to read if there's time and pages I read at
the moment. Works fine, thanks.

Maybe this is also a function of browser capability: If your browser crashes
or becomes unusable with many tabs you won't open many.

~~~
petegrif
Please excuse my curiosity. How do you navigate so many tabs? Is it in some
way more efficient than reading them in blocks of say 10 or 20?

I am interested in your use case of pages you read every day. I have such
pages and I would love to be able to open a specified list of such pages with
one click. Is there a way of doing that? Or an add-on for it?

~~~
zargon
I use Session Manager. Open all the tabs you use daily, and then save the
session and configure Session Manager to open that session on every startup.
([https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-
manag...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-manager/))

------
lysium
Opera's doing just fine. As I am writing this, Opera has all 150 tabs open and
still feels snappy. ~1.5GB memory and ~30% CPU (currently). I could not
measure the time but it was well below 10min.

~~~
Tomis
Opera has always been a performer when low specs and lots of tabs were
involved, cruising with 50+ tabs when Firefox and Chrome choked my system at
10+ tabs.

~~~
zobzu
The major issue with opera is that you can't easily automate the tests, that's
why it's often missing when people test IE and Chrome and FF. So it's hard to
benchmark stuff and most don't take the time to do it.

That said opera is known to be rather fast.

~~~
icebraining
It might be more difficult, but you can certainly automate opening a bunch of
tabs using a script to send keypresses, no?

~~~
donuttrunk
sort of, a lot of the actions by this script rely on the browser giving
feedback (e.g. finished loading the page). You could write a script to gather
feedback from the display (i.e. by taking screenshots) but it's too much
effort to maintain with new releases.

------
chrislomax
I recently switched from Firefox to Chrome after their appalling release of
Firefox 4 & 5\. 5 Is better than 4, but only slightly. In most cases, Chrome
out performs Firefox now and it's a shame that I had to switch from Firefox.

Although these are real world statistics you encountered, I still think that
Firefox needs to buck their ideas up and start releasing more stable versions.

~~~
zobzu
The version in the story is Firefox nightly aka Firefox 8. There are many
changes from Firefox 5 to 8. Since they adopted the rapid release, Firefox 8
won't take forever to be stable, but it will still take a few month.

~~~
chrislomax
I'm much aware of their recent release schedule changes, I just hope that they
are not sacrificing stability for increased version release. Firefox used to
be about testing and stability rather than who has the bigger version number.

4 was an insult to me, crashing all the time and so slow, pathetic in the
terms of a browser, I would have rather used IE for a couple of months whilst
that was released and that's saying something

------
tjoff
Humm. My experience are completely opposite. In my experience firefox breaks
down quite fast and chrome has always been many orders of magnitude better
than any browser I've tested (firefox, (safari), opera, IE).

I have about 500 tabs in chrome now, never been close to that with any other
browser, granted the computer is barely usable now as chrome takes pretty much
all resources so I'm working on closing some down :) But 2-300 is no problem
at all and chrome is the only browser that's capable of that (without serious
performance issues) on my machine (64bit Win7 8 GB ram).

And the comments to the article resonates well with my experiences: "Another
test, maybe closer to reality: open many tabs, close half of them, open many
new tabs, close half of them, etc… And see how your memory gets lost, until
you finally have to kill the Firefox process to get it back, so you can open
other applications."

And many others that mention that firefox can't handle being left on for days
without breaking. I have hundreds of tabs in chrome for weeks at a time,
sometimes probably longer but every now and then I feel like letting it
update... (although it is a pain to start it with hundreds of tabs and I often
get blocked from HN after I start chrome (guess I trigger some dos-filter ;P).

Also, any browser that doesn't run flash in a separate process (that you can
kill yourself) isn't usable at all (that is, if you have flash installed
(flashblock only delays the inevitable)). Even with few tabs that is a total
deal breaker (and really has been since the day chrome launched).

~~~
nnethercote
Firefox 7 and 8 (both in development) are _much_ better behaved over long
sessions. You should give one of them a try.

~~~
blasdel
By how much? When I switched to Chrome, Firefox 3 would crash on me at least
once every 6 hours of use (10+ times a week), and take 15+ minutes to reopen
with ~150 tabs.

Chrome on the other hand has always handled 300+ tabs without blinking.
Closing and restarting it with that load takes about 20s to be usable and a
couple minutes for all the content to be loaded — basically limited only by my
internet connection. It crashes about one every three months, ironically only
when I tell it to quit.

Firefox would have to now be three orders of magnitude better in these
respects in order to have caught up with Chrome.

P.S. Mozilla's messaging with "try version 7 or 8" is _fucking abysmal_.
Seriously shut the fuck up about version numbers if you're going to increment
them so often. Don't copy Chrome's development cycle without also copying
their release structure: normal, dev, canary.

------
jokermatt999
Just out curiosity, how do Chrome users deal with multiple tabs? I always felt
like Chrome's tab bar became useless when I was going through my RSS feeds,
because tabs shrunk to nothing. Side tabs is kind of a solution, but the lack
of hierarchy (and IMO, ugliness) makes it an unattractive solution. In FF, I
can have 52 tabs open (just checke) with TreeStyleTab and all them be visible.
Chrome gets unwieldy after about 15 or so last I checked.

~~~
tom9729
Categorizing tabs into separate windows and using virtual desktops.

------
DanielBMarkham
My Chrome default startup settings open about 40 tabs. Sometimes in addition
to this I might open 20 or more news articles in rapid succession in order to
scan headlines and lead paragraphs. I've noticed this effect many times.

Still, I can't help but think this is a tweak. I mean, at the end of the day,
we're talking about CPU time, memory allocation, and processing priority,
right? So allocate a few extra processes and large chunks of memory, set the
priority such that Chromium doesn't tank the system, then work a buffer
allocation system.

Of course, that's rampant speculation on my part. Seems like I read somewhere
that timing and process priority is still an unsettled issue in Linux, so I
know it's a lot more complicated than I make it out to be. (But I also know
that having 150 processes do things without hosing things up is by no means an
unusual situation in any operating system.)

------
mgkimsal
Chrome also gets to a usable state much slower than FF for me (osx10.6 - mbp
13"). The window opens faster, but it just _hangs_ for a heck of a long time
(10-15 seconds). FF is slower to paint its first window, but is usable much
faster overall (meaning, I can type in to the web address bar).

------
loso
This has been the main reason why I have not totally committed to Chrome.
While I do not usually have 100 tabs open there are times when I do have 30 -
40 open. In Firefox the browser slows down but not horribly so. In Chrome the
browser is still usable but it is noticeably slower than Firefox.

I love everything else about Chrome and while I realize that the degraded tab
performance is a trade off, it still bugs me enough to not do a full and
complete switch. That is why when I am casually browsing the web I will use
Firefox. But when I am using a web app or working, I will use Chrome.

------
rrrazdan
This is why I use both Chrome and Firefox. I am a big, tab user, and Chrome
doesn't even provide decent tab management with large number of tabs, so I
have not been able to even test it properly. So Chrome is my default system
browser for quickly opening a link, that I get through chats, email, etc and
for quick browsing and google sessions. It starts up fast and is well 'fast'.
For serious research/reading/browsing sessions I prefer to use Firefox.
Synchronize bookmarks and yay, you have the best of both worlds.

------
mun2mun
My firefox browsing way is to open every link in new tab. Going back and forth
in same tab caches every page browsed in the tab so it increases memory
consumption. In this I usually end up opening 40+ tabs. But tab management is
super easy with firefox thanks to tree style tab extension. Even 40+ tabs
opened my firefox memory consumption is much less than chrome opened 40+ tab
(which is unmanageble due to shrinked size of tab bar)

------
scott_s
Windows, Linux or OSX? I'm curious because on Linux, threads and processes are
essentially the same thing - they're the same data structure in the kernel.
But as far as I know, that is not true on Windows.

I also find his conclusion a bit disingenuous: I never have more than ~10 tabs
open. I'm more interested in the performance around my actual usage, not an
order of magnitude more.

~~~
nicocompass
How is it disingenuous at all? It clearly specifies the conditions and re-
emphasizes in the conclusion that the analysis was done based on which browser
handles having a large number of tabs open better. Also, the plural of
anecdote is not data, but I routinely have more than 100 tabs open. So this
analysis is clearly relevant and interesting to me. Edit: proof-reading.

~~~
scott_s
I guess we all have different definitions of "many" in the statement of "many
tabs." I didn't think 100 open tabs is realistic, but enough people here seem
to do it.

------
emilis_info
Thanks for posting test results. I am using Tree Style Tabs extension for
FireFox and have _lots_ of tabs open all the time.

Now I don't need to test myself if I should switch to Chrome :-)

------
ori_b
Interesting. This doesn't match my experience at all.

When I have lots of tabs open in Firefox, there are occasional pauses where
everything, including the browser's chrome, freezes. I've never noticed these
pauses in Chrome.

And yes, I do open hundreds of tabs. (As a side note, Chrome's far smaller
minimum tab size is a major bonus for my usage, simply because I can see more
tabs without scrolling the tab bar).

~~~
zobzu
you need Firefox 8 to feel the improvements

~~~
ori_b
Perhaps, but if this test is accurate, Chrome has also gotten far, far worse
in recent versions. I find that surprising.

~~~
starwed
This test isn't about having lots of tabs open, but having lots of tabs
_opening_ , all loading at the same time.

~~~
ori_b
Ok. So, apparently, it's testing a usecase that doesn't happen in normal use.
So why should I care?

~~~
starwed
You don't have to? This was a blog post written by a guy whose _job_ is to
care about Firefox's memory usage. Most of his work goes into improving every
day memory usage, but he thought it would be interesting to see what happens
in an extreme case. Chrome is the main competitor, so he ran the same tests
against it, so there was something to compare to.

No doubt some portion of people upvoting this article are invested in a
_Firefox v. Chrome_ narrative, but that really wasn't the point of the
original article.

------
blackRust
Interesting to see this being done on a more "normal" amount of tabs. That
depends from user to user but IMO a ~50 tab for a power user.

------
beaumartinez
Really interesting. I wonder how these would have fared on Windows (Windows
having a different threading system to pthreads)?

------
traldan
This has been what I've experienced for more than just the latest versions. In
personal usage the crossover between Chrome and Firefox has always been in the
neighborhood of 20-30 tabs. Past that. Chrome has always seemed more sluggish
(and less usable, given how tiny the tabs get).

~~~
FeministHacker
Likewise. I typically keep open a large number of tabs, opening a pile of
links at once and then going through them during the working day. At any one
time, I tend to have a hundred-odd tabs open.

Although to be fair, firefox isn't too happy with that workflow, either - but
I blame that partially on flash and javascript.

------
brianb722
Wow. So many people with an ungodly number of open tabs. Think you guys need
to check out Instapaper and a bookmarking service such as Diigo. You'll be
much happier and both you and your computer will be much more productive.

------
nolite
I've had the contrary experience with FF4 and Chrome... Chrome is like
lightning

~~~
slowpoke
Except - as multiple people already mentioned - this article is about the
Firefox _Nightly_ , which currently means Firefox 8. There are _huge_
differences between FF 4 and FF 8 (or 4 and >5, for that matter).

------
ck2
But I bet chrome is smoother - firefox goes crazy if I have one tab doing
something heavy duty, all the others are sluggish. Still sticking with firefox
though because of some plugins.

------
adrianscott
I find Firefox using up 25% cpu a lot with 40-50 tabs open whereas chrome (on
win 7 64-bit) is nowhere near that; similar memory usage... so I use Chrome
more...

------
knodi
Chrome lately has been really slow for me and GIF performance is terrible (but
I guess this is a webkit problem).

------
zobzu
which kind of pro google mod changed the link title to something that
meaningful? lol.

------
rajpaul
Interesting test, but the real world usability significance of this are
minimal.

Now, if Firefox auto updates in the background like Chrome, I might consider
giving it another chance. When I want to go on the net, I don't want to wait
for my browser to update.

~~~
bzbarsky
Chrome doesn't update in the background. It downloads the update in the
background, then applies it at startup the next time it starts. It just
doesn't tell you it's doing that, so you get a slow startup with no
explanation of why.

The "tell you" part is the only difference between the workflow for current
Firefox updates and Chrome updates, in fact... And yes, Firefox might start
doing them silently precisely because of the purely psychological issue you
describe.

~~~
rajpaul
>Chrome doesn't update in the background.

How do you know that? I assumed Chrome did update in the background because it
uses Google's Omaha project, which supports updating when the system is idle.

"attempt to update application when the user's machine is idle"

[http://omaha.googlecode.com/svn/wiki/OmahaOverview.html#Sche...](http://omaha.googlecode.com/svn/wiki/OmahaOverview.html#Scheduler_007823295652064743_5_09283186493616913)

~~~
bzbarsky
Oh, it may be able to update "in the background" if the browser is not
running. I assumed you meant updating while the browser is running so the
update is ready to go the next time you start the browser.

For my use cases, the two situations are actually equivalent, since my browser
starts at boot and only shuts down with the OS or when I decide I should
really install the security update.

------
RyanKearney
Ah yes and then when one tab crashes you lose all 100 tabs. Brilliant!

~~~
icebraining
plugin-container, which effectively runs in a different process, has solved
that issue for me. I haven't had a FF tab crash in months.

