IBM Developer Site talks about reducing your Linux memory footprint; which browser uses least memory
Published February 2nd, 2007 12:27 PM EST By Daniel GoldmanAn article on the IBM developer site discusses how to reduce the amount of memory used by various applications on a linux machine. Among the applications it discussed is a web browser.
Some quotes from the article:
“From this table, you can see that there is a very large range in memory usage, with the most memory-hungry browser (Firefox) using approximately 27 times more memory than the most frugal (Lynx). This isn’t really a fair comparison, as Lynx is not really functionally equivalent (it does not even display graphics, for instance), but it does show that, depending upon your requirements, you can vastly reduce your memory usage. Even among the first three browsers listed in Table 1, which are more or less functionally equivalent to one another, Opera uses approximately two-thirds the amount of memory of Firefox, and Konqueror uses less than half of Firefox’s memory.”
“Note also that when we compare the shared memory use, Konqueror performs much better than Firefox, using around 14MB less memory; if we look at the total use, however, while Konqueror still does better than Firefox, it doesn’t do so by such a wide margin — only by 5MB or so. This is because Konqueror makes heavy use of shared KDE libraries that are loaded into lots of applications, as I am using the KDE desktop. If I were not using any other KDE apps, however, Opera would be a better choice than KDE. We’ll discuss this issue in more detail later.”
There are some things to keep in mind when talking about memory consumption in applications, such as browsers. Petter Nilsen, a developer at Opera Software, blogged about this last year.
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:-p
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That’s only with one tab open and no extensions installed on Firefox, the difference is much more noticiable when multiple tabs are open, Opera tends to manage resources much better than the other two when doing heavy browsing.
Every *nix user who has ever tried to use Firefox on an old system knows that it is just impossible, FF needs at least 256M in order to be usable. The recent OLPC issue is a good example of it, they added more RAM so Firefox could run on it…
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At last I have Fedora core 6 as I want it, and have Opera back… just in time to be told its a wise choice! I knew that already.
Before reading the article I did think Dillo would be good for low memory usage, and I was right, although it can be a bit fustrating to use.