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Firefox version: benchmarking memory footprint

Raymond Hill edited this page Sep 25, 2015 · 20 revisions

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Note: Results have been updated with latest Firefox 41 and Chromium 45. The page is the same as the old one (Firefox 35/Chromium 39, archived here), except all figures have been updated using latest browser versions.

Vim test
Infamous VIM test: ABP 370 MB vs. uBlock 373 MB. Firefox 41 64-bit. On Chromium-based browsers, ABP still suffers memory footprint issues from injecting a huge stylesheet in each page and in each embedded frames on a page.

Setup

  1. Ensure the blocker is the only active extension (to avoid results to be polluted by other extensions)
  2. Ensure click-to-play (or whatever equivalent) is enabled before launching the benchmark
  3. Select the following filter lists in the benchmarked blockers:
    • EasyList
    • Peter Lowe's Ad server list
    • EasyPrivacy
    • Fanboy's Social Blocking List
    • Malware domain lists
    • ABP-specifics: "Acceptable ads" disabled
    • uBlock-specifics: uBlock's filters enabled (+140 filters), extra malware domains (+1,487 filters)

Steps

  1. Have the benchmarked blocker enabled and properly setup
  2. Have only the "new tab" opened
  3. Quit Firefox
  4. Launch Firefox
  5. Paste http://news.yahoo.com/ in address bar, wait for page to finish loading
  6. Open new tab, paste http://news.google.com/, wait for page to finish loading
  7. Open new tab, paste http://www.huffingtonpost.com/, wait for page to finish loading
  8. Open new tab, paste http://www.cnn.com/, wait for page to finish loading
  9. Open new tab, paste http://www.nytimes.com/, wait for page to finish loading
  10. Open new tab, paste http://www.foxnews.com/, wait for page to finish loading
  11. Open new tab, paste http://www.nbcnews.com/, wait for page to finish loading
  12. Open new tab, paste http://www.dailymail.co.uk/, wait for page to finish loading
  13. Open new tab, paste http://www.washingtonpost.com/, wait for page to finish loading
  14. Open new tab, paste http://www.theguardian.com/, wait for page to finish loading
  15. Open new tab, paste https://news.ycombinator.com/, wait for page to finish loading
  16. Leave the browser idle for two minutes
  17. Open new tab, paste about:memory, wait for page to finish loading
  18. Firefox: Click "Minimize memory usage" button in "Free memory" section
  19. Firefox: Click Measure button in "Show memory reports" section
  20. Firefox: Write down "Explicit Allocations" value (see notes below) / Chromium: Write down Σ value

So I did the exact above steps for no blocker, ABP, uBlock.

Results

  • Firefox
    • No blocker: 751.22 MB (reference memory usage)
    • Adblock Plus 2.6.10: 639.49 MB (reference minus 111.7 MB)
    • uBlock Origin 1.1.1: 465.86 MB (reference minus 285.4 MB, ABP minus 173.6 MB)
  • Chromium
    • No blocker: 1,342.87 MB (reference memory usage)
    • Adblock Plus 1.9.3: 1,525.4 MB (reference plus 182.5 MB)
    • uBlock Origin 1.1.1: 1,110.02 MB (reference minus 232.9 MB, ABP minus 415.4 MB)

Important: You can't compare directly the figures between the browsers -- they are taken using different methodology from one browser to the other. The benchmarks are more to compare the figures for various blockers within the same browser.

Notes

Tested on Firefox 41.0 64-bit and Chromium 45.0.2454.85 64-bit on Linux Mint. No other extensions were present.

For Firefox, I chose the "Explicit Allocations" figure because as per Firefox, it is "the single best number to focus on" with regard to memory usage.

Without going into details, hardware is i5 quadcore + 8 GB

If other users feel like repeating the tests, it would be nice just to confirm I got everything right.