Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 - seriously bloated

By splicer707
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splicer707

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Now there's a shocker! After evaluating Internet Explorer 8, the folks over at the exo.performance.network (the ones who brought you Windows Sentinel) are declaring it to be one seriously bloated piece of software. Not only is it "fatter" than IE 7, it's also more resource-intensive. Here are the stats in all their gruesome glory:

350-400MB memory footprint

150-200 concurrent execution threads

6 discrete iexplore.exe process instances

Over 2x more demanding than Firefox

The above was recorded during a rather pedestrian-sounding, 10-site browsing scenario featuring popular sites like Fox News, CNet, and the New York Times, not to mention InfoWorld.com. During testing, they compared IE 8 to IE 7 and FireFox 3.01 running atop box Windows XP (SP3) and Vista (SP1), using the DMS Clarity Tracker agent to record system and process metrics from the test boxes.

Of course, the numbers don't mean much without some context. Suffice to say that IE 8 consumes more RAM than Windows XP does (the entire OS). If I boot XP (SP3) on a 1GB system, I have more than 800MB free. Add IE 8 to the mix and, depending on the site workload, I can suddenly find myself with less than half that. The situation is even worse under Vista. In fact, IE 8 is fatter than my word processor (Word 2007), spreadsheet (Excel 2007), and presentation software (PowerPoint 2007) combined. It's even fatter than Visual Studio 2008 with 10,000 lines of code and several complex, multi-part Web forms loaded into the IDE.

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splicer707

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I find it funny how people love Chrome's "one process per tab" while saying IE sucks for doing the same thing.

'One Process Per Tab' is great. But IE8 Beta 2 uses more memory per tab on the same site than Chrome or Firefox.

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morphen

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Unused RAM is wasted RAM, period.

+1 :D

I wonder why people really care if a program uses 500mb ram, as long as it free's it up when closing, and, as long as it does not use 100% cpu while running. people seem to think that the less memory footprint, the better it is (goes only for torrent clients, as ?torrent is king <- my opinion).

Most people have 2gb or more nowadays, and "even in vista" you will not notice a program using 500mb on the preformance of your computer.

People keep ranting away on memory usage.

btw; i think photoshop is bloated, it uses 1400mb memory while i edit high resolution photographs.

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Quillz

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I'll never understand people who happily spend lots of money on 4+ GB of RAM and then complain when your OS uses it. Would you prefer Vista used all of your RAM intelligently (the RAM you paid for), or not use it at all, like XP and older version of Windows did?

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Scirwode

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I'll never understand people who happily spend lots of money on 4+ GB of RAM and then complain when your OS uses it. Would you prefer Vista used all of your RAM intelligently (the RAM you paid for), or not use it at all, like XP and older version of Windows did?

Well, it's Microsoft, damn if they do, damn if they don't. A bit sad really.

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x-byte

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IE 8 is fat. Period. All of which begs the question: What were these people thinking? Since when does making an application 50 percent larger (in terms of RAM consumption) and nearly 3x more CPU-hungry (in terms of concurrent execution threads) constitute progress? And I thought Vista was bloated!

What a douche... It's not like the application eats your RAM and don't give it back. And the last sentence just shows how ignorant he really is.

My guess is that they're designing IE 8 for the future. Microsoft knows that the next generation of CPUs from Intel and AMD will sport at least 4 discrete processing cores. They also know that RAM is cheap and that many die-hard Windows "fan bois" are already running with 8GB or more of RAM under Vista x64. If anything, IE 8 is a shout-out to the company’s hardware vendor partners, a way to prod people into moving up-market to 64-bit computing on tomorrow's stat-of-the-art, "many-core" platforms.

:laugh: ?

Now all I need to do is go out and buy one of those new 8-core PCs (when they become available) and equip it with lots and lots of RAM (16GB should hold me for a while). Oh, and the 64-bit flavor of Vista so I can actually use all that RAM (32-bit Vista supports a paltry 4GB, and we all know how limiting that can be).

Or wait for the final product before making a complete fool of yourself.?:rolleyes:s:

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Bazenga

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and his website has been added to my router's block list...

The same uneducated rant as Vista is bloated, used too much RAM, blah blah... Go get a life, it is only a browser, use what you see fit.

Unused RAM is wasted RAM, period.

True. According to your logic, unused processor power is wasted (shouldn't windows use 100% of your cpu power 24 hours per day so it's not considered wasted?)and I pretty much believe that it's not using your harddrive as well. (why isn't your hdd spinning at 7200 rpm 24 hours per day?, even better why isn't windows filling your entire hdd space, it unused resource, isn't it?).

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zhangm Supervisor

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exo.performance.network is declaring IE 8 to the be one seriously bloated piece of software. Not only is it fatter than IE 7, it's also more resource-intensive

Subjective: Bloat is a catch-all phrase with little to no meaning these days. You can tell however, that a site is attention-whoring by the frequency of use. Suffice it to say that people will consider anything bloated if it contains features that they feel little need for, i.e. OS X with Automator is bloated, Windows Vista with instant search is bloated, Firefox with Ctrl+Tab previews is bloated, Kubuntu (KDE) is bloated, Safari with RSS feed manager is bloated. Resource-intensive also has little meaning on its own, since the article refuses to address the reason behind the resource usage. What exactly is using those resources, and do those features merit the RAM consumption? How efficiently does the operating system manage its memory (comparing XP to Vista here is laughable, since Vista's way of managing RAM is light-years ahead, and makes the concept of "free ram is good ram" obsolete), how effectively and quickly does the application yield its RAM to other programs?

Now that I look at the rest of the article, I don't need to quote much more of it. You get the gist, approximately 70% of it consists of remarking that IE8 is bloated, that Firefox is superior, that IE8 is bloated, that IE8 is fat, that IE8 is bloated, that IE8 consumes huge amounts of RAM, ad nauseum. Then the author goes off on an absurdly off-topic hyperbole about how Microsoft software requires insanely exaggerated hardware. Did you drag this refuse in as some sort of a joke? Are you trying to prove that any idiot can make a website on the internet?

Now there's a shocker!
Windows "fan bois"

What's the point of this useless colloquialism? What does it contribute to the point that the author is trying to make? I think that its yet another sign that the author is some fat turd sitting on his couch, eating potato chips, and pretending to be an expert on the internet.

True. According to your logic, unused processor power is wasted (shouldn't windows use 100% of your cpu power 24 hours per day so it's not considered wasted?)and I pretty much believe that it's not using your harddrive as well. (why isn't your hdd spinning at 7200 rpm 24 hours per day?, even better why isn't windows filling your entire hdd space, it unused resource, isn't it?).

Your analogy is incomplete. It all depends on what it's doing, doesn't it? Is Folding@Home a waste of processor idle time? How about SETI@Home? Sure, if ramping the processor cores to 100% while they are idle actually carries some benefit, then yes, it is up to the end user whether that benefit justified the increased power consumption, heat, noise, etc. How much expense is incurred when filling your RAM? To most people, the speed boost afforded by pre-loading frequently used data for instantaneous access is worth that cost.

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George P Global Moderator

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True. According to your logic, unused processor power is wasted (shouldn't windows use 100% of your cpu power 24 hours per day so it's not considered wasted?)and I pretty much believe that it's not using your harddrive as well. (why isn't your hdd spinning at 7200 rpm 24 hours per day?, even better why isn't windows filling your entire hdd space, it unused resource, isn't it?).

That's a nice way to twist things. His logic isn't wrong, and it only applies to RAM, I like how you want to make it sound like he's talking about every part of your system.

The main issue is RAM usage since that's what everyone points at with their "bloated" cries. The fact is you buy RAM to use it, just like you buy a bigger HDD to fill it up with whatever stuff you install or download. The key difference here is that RAM is always in use, even if your PC is idle. If you have 2GB or more and a program uses 500MB to make sure everything is working as fast as it can (insted of dumping things from RAM to your pagefile) then isn't that what you wanted in the first place?

Like that 1TB hdd you buy a fill up over time don't you want apps and the OS to use all of the ram you paid for? Don't you want apps to use all your cpu cores that you paid for and not just one? Doesn't the same apply to your flashy new video card? I mean you payed god knows how much for it, don't you want games to use it to the max? Or do you want it to just sit there and collect dust?

While IE8b2 does use more RAM then other browsers the thing people need to remember is that there is loads of debug code and other unoptimized parts that are being compiled. The best thing is to wait for a RC or RTM version to compare RAM/CPU and overall performance, don't you think?

Edited by GP007
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bobbytomorow

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I wonder why people really care if a program uses 500mb ram

Maybe because some people like to multi task or run vm ware?

The fact RAM is cheap isn't an excuse for an application to run inefficiently and hog it all. If there are alternatives that can do the same thing faster and using less resources which one are you going to choose? Oh yeah you are sticking up for IE....

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George P Global Moderator

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If you're going to multitask and run VMware you have a system with 4GB probably. You buy as much RAM as you figure you need for the programs you run.

Why don't we take a step back and look at FF2, which was the RAM hog king until they finally decided to manage memory better with v3. Yet people still jumped up and down saying it's a great browser and so on. I know not everyone has forgotten those old FF2.x days right? Or hell, how about the 1.x days, cuz those weren't any better.

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splicer707

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so when google decides to seperate all tabs in different processes it's innovative and a huge step forward for browsing. But when microsoft does the same since ie8 beta 1 it's a resource hungry, bloated application

...

get a life

I think there are some journalists who are attacking IE8 Beta 2 because it's their way to get noticed.

However, I expected more for IE8. Still, it's only Beta 2. Microsoft are renowned for fixing up software really well before release.

Edited by splicer707
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Fourjays Veteran

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Why don't we take a step back and look at FF2, which was the RAM hog king until they finally decided to manage memory better with v3. Yet people still jumped up and down saying it's a great browser and so on. I know not everyone has forgotten those old FF2.x days right? Or hell, how about the 1.x days, cuz those weren't any better.

I don't know about others, but on my P4 with 1Gb RAM, FF2 used less (about 70Mb with 3 tabs) than FF3 does (113Mb with 3 tabs). It may be related to the single core vs multi-core thing that was being discussed in the Chrome thread.

A program should use as little as possible of all resources. By that I mean, using more memory is not bad providing it actually needs it to get the job done. If one browser uses 50Mb of RAM and another (with similar features) uses 500Mb, then the second browser is using more than it really needs to.

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Owen W Veteran

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Wow, sounds like another article from another ranting idiot.

Yeah, you've gotta be kidding me...this article is rubbish. IE8...is faster than its predecessors...just a whole load of crap really.

I found IE8 quite fast tbh

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andy2004

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seriously who cares ? standard de facto for pc's these days is 2GB ram with 4GB ram becoming common. If IE8 wants to use more resources then let it. If you want to talk about resources then I can tell you about how my itunes uses up to 1.2GB memory when all of my art is loaded for a 70GB+ itunes library :laugh:

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andy2004

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True. According to your logic, unused processor power is wasted (shouldn't windows use 100% of your cpu power 24 hours per day so it's not considered wasted?)and I pretty much believe that it's not using your harddrive as well. (why isn't your hdd spinning at 7200 rpm 24 hours per day?, even better why isn't windows filling your entire hdd space, it unused resource, isn't it?).

Actually windows DOES use 100% of CPU power, ever heard of system idle process ? its there for a reason

windowsresourceud2.png

In Windows NT operating systems, the System Idle Process is a kernel thread, which runs when no other runnable thread can be scheduled on a CPU. For example, there may be no runnable thread in the system, or all runnable threads are already running on a different CPU.

The System Idle Process is used by Windows NT to implement CPU power saving. The exact power saving scheme depends on the hardware and firmware capabilities of the system in question. For instance, on x86 processors, the process will run a loop of HLT instructions, which causes the CPU to turn off many internal components and wait until an IRQ arrives.

The CPU time consumed by the System Idle Process is commonly of interest for end users, as it is a measure of the CPU utilization in their system which is easily accessible through Windows' Task Manager program. There are, however, more detailed sources of such information available through Windows' performance monitoring system (accessible with the perfmon program), which includes more finely grained categorization of CPU time spending. A limited subset of the CPU time categorization is also accessible through the Task Manager, which can display CPU usage by CPU, and categorized by time spent in user vs. kernel code. It should be noted, though, that that information is not calculated from information about the System Idle Process, but from the system's global performance counters.

When nothing else is using CPU processing power, the System Idle Process kicks in, taking up all the rest of the CPU cycles. If you enable the "CPU Time" column in Windows Task Manager, you will see that it is always counting - a good measure of how long your computer's been switched on in the current session. However, on some computers it counts at double speed (probably to do with hyper-threading or multi-threading), and thus the time your computer has been on is half of that time specified.

System Idle Process

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