[SuperTramp83]
> Without addons the recent versions of FF take around 150 mb of RAM when
opened,
[/SuperTramp83]
[me]
> Now I have just freshly started Firefox (one tab, blank page) and its RAM
usage is 270572 K.
[/me]
Just in case anyone wonders why there is such a big difference, it is
probably and mostly due to different "memory crowdedness" of our systems. The
more crowded RAM becomes, the more aggresively kernel starts paging out code
segments (and shrinks data cache, which is out of our scope in this context).
IOW, contention for RAM increases linear to the crowdedness. The more acute
the competition, the less memory is allocated to programs, which translates
to increasingly more active pages occupy RAM space, others paged out. So the
same program can ocuppy much different RAM (consume) in different
environments.
Crowdedness is a function of cumulative memory needs of all programs versus
available physical memory.
E.g. on a system with 16GB RAM and running no other program than Firefox
(except a minimalist barebones DE), the same Firefox' initial startup RAM
usage may be perhaps 1 GB.
Conversely, on a system with 1GB of RAM and with a very "rich" (bloated)
runtime environment, initial RAM consumption of the same Firefox may be
perhaps less than 100 MB.
I have 4G of RAM and concurrently using such and such programs. SuperTramp83
uses perhaps 2GB of RAM and uses a different set of programs. So, our
systems' memory crowdedness factors are different.
This is one reason why RAM consumptions cannot be benchmarked between
different systems (or different times). I use program X and it consumes 100M.
An hour later the same program consumes 200M (decrased crowdedness). You use
program Y and it consumes 300 M. An hour later the same program consumes 150M
(increased crowdedness). It conveys nothing. When I (or you) use *both*
programs at the same time and record their *concurrent* memory consumptions,
then this is meaningful benchmark-worthy data.
