On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 1:53 AM, Julien Lavergne <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > In order to have more feedbacks before deciding to switch to Firefox, > or to keep Chromium by default, I would like to ask you some > testimonies and any feedbacks about the use of the 2 browsers. We need > to evaluate the use of the 2 browsers *on old and not-so-fast > hardware*. It's important because our main targets are this type of > hardware. I know people are using Lubuntu on high specs hardware (like > me), but this is not our main goal to optimize the system for this > type of people. > > One tip if you want to compare memory usage between the 2 browsers : > go to the address chrome://memory under chromium. That should not be > the only source of information, but it can help in your evaluation. > > So, if you have feedback on using both browsers, please bring it to us > :-) But please, keep the discussion on this topic (feedback on low > spec hardware). > > Thanks in advance :-) > > Regards, > Julien Lavergne
I did some test with my old dsektop PC with the following spec: CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3GHz (single core) with HT turned on. RAM: 768 MB OS: ArchLinux (no ubuntu on this machine) I tested Firefox, Chromium, Midori, Arora, and Qupzilla. None of them work after I open more than 3-4 tabs because they use up my RAM. Almost all of them are frozen after I open facebook + yahoo. The command "free" showed that simply after opening 3-4 pages I run out of my RAM. My swap is being used quite frequently. Hence the freeze. However, after I did the following, things changed a lot. 1. Use CK-patched kernel (BFS scheduler) => only mild improvement 2. Edit /etc/sysctl.conf to set "swappiness" to 10 instead of the default 60 => use swap less frequently inititally 3. Install zram module => Greatly improve overall performance!!! After the preceding changes, Midori becomes the fastest. Things are still smooth after I open several tabs. Switching among tabs are fastest with Midori. Then Firefox is the second smooth browser. Arora and Qupzilla are still slower than Midori. I dropped Midori long time ago because it crashes constantly. However it has improved a lot in these years, too, just like Firefox. So maybe it should be an option again. I'd suggest that we enable zRAM by default on Lubuntu and set swappiness to a lower value. Compression/decompression in RAM is something that a 586 cpu can do easily so it's always faster than reading or writing to the swap. It also decreases read/writes for your hard disk due to decreased use of on-disk swap. This is a plus if you're using SSD. Thanks! -- Lubuntu-users mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/lubuntu-users
