Chromium vs Firefox : Need testimonies

[Yorvyk]

On 01/06/13 22:46, Leszek Lesner wrote:
> Am 01.06.2013 23:21, schrieb PCMan:
>> On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 1:53 AM, Julien Lavergne<gilir at ubuntu.com>  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!
>>
> +1
> zram really should be enabled by default. There are now downsides to it.
> Tweaking the sysctl.conf swappiness is however another question. I would
> recommend leaving it at the default value.
>
I've not found any down sides to zRAM with more than 512 MiB of RAM. 
Below that, especially with CPUs below 1GHz, there are frequent pauses 
as memory gets swapped about when the zRAM allocation has been used up 
and swap starts using the disk partition/file. Above 2GiB of RAM zRAM 
doesn't appear to have much effect.

Adjusting swappiness down to 10 or 20 also causes similar effects to 
above on really low resource machines.

These effects are probably due to the low memory bandwidth and slow HDDs 
in older machinery.

-- 


Steve