A few days ago, I read this Lifehacker piece, Take Control of Your Mac’s Memory Usage. I was surprised to read that when it comes to RAM usage the Chrome browser is "an absolute beast…. Because of the way that Chrome works, multiple sub-processes (called Workers) are run as you use it. It doesn't take very long for there to be a dozen (or more) of these Chrome Workers, and each one usually uses about 20MB of RAM. That's not all, though. Chrome also spawns other, more specialized worker processes called Renderers, and those can use anywhere from 90MB to 200MB or more, each. The longer you use a tab in Chrome, the more RAM it will consume, so try not to keep any one tab open too long."
This morning I thought I'd do a quick little experiment to compare RAM use by Chrome versus by Safari. I am running the most current version of each on a dual core iMac with 2 GB of RAM. In each browser I had the same four tabs open: my NetVibes home page, Twitter, Instapaper, and a Google search results page.
As you can see from the screenshots below, Chrome used 545 MB of RAM, almost twice as much as Safari (284 MB).
Take the results of this highly unscientific test for what they are worth to you. Safari has been my browser of choice, but I like Chrome and use it now and then, as I will continue to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment