Why does Opera use so much RAM?
Vincent Delporte
I've been using Opera for a few years now, but I always wondered why
it uses so much RAM.
For instance, I'm running 8.54 on XPSP2: I opened 23 pages this
afternoon (almost all of them pure static stuff, with the remainder
refreshing themselves every few minutes due to some HTML saying so):
It is now 11:43PM, and Task Manager says Opera uses 100MB :-/
Memory leaks?
Thank you.
Snorre
I've heard Opera tends to use 10% of available RAM or so, given that you
let it play the automatic game. Using the mailer will also add to the
usage. Try playing with the memory cache size (preferences, advanced,
history) and see if that helps.
The theory is that unused ram is wasted ram, but if it's hogging ram you
need ...
--
Snorre / h3st!
Beware the tongue of teh horsei:
http://folk.ntnu.no/emilsnor/bilder/horsei.jpg
Vincent Delporte
wrote:
>I've heard Opera tends to use 10% of available RAM or so, given that you
>let it play the automatic game. Using the mailer will also add to the
>usage. Try playing with the memory cache size (preferences, advanced,
>history) and see if that helps.
Disk space = 20MB. Very far from 100MB. Result: I can hear the HD
spinning hard whenever I view pages that I left opened a couple of
hours before. Me thinks this cross-platform thingie has quite a few
memory leaks...
Thx.
Whiskers
Is there something else you would prefer the RAM to be doing?
I think that Opera for Windows simply makes full use of whatever 'memory'
it can, in the interests of a quick response.
--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~
Vincent Delporte
<catwh...@operamail.com> wrote:
>Is there something else you would prefer the RAM to be doing?
Yes, like not sucking up so much of it needlessly (load 20 pages :
uses 20MB already; go for a long walk, come back a couple of hours
later : we're now at 100MB) so that other programs are paged out ;-)
Bob
Firefox is far worse. Yes it clearly has memory leaks. FF would have
used 300-400 MB.
Whiskers
According to the Opera 'help' page for the 'history' settings, Opera uses
disc space to 'store' web pages that you open, so that you can get back to
them quickly. So the HD /should/ be accessed when you go back to one of
your 'open' pages.
What setting have you got for 'Memory cache'? (Or is that only something
that appears for the Linux version that I'm using?).
You can see exactly what is in Opera's cache by entering
opera:cache
in the address bar. The size of each item is given, and you can click on
the "address" to view it. If you click on 'empty now' next to the 'disc
cache' setting in the Preferences - advanced - History dialogue, then
whatever is left in Opera's cache, must be in RAM. That will probably be
whatever you've visited most recently.
Vincent Delporte
<catwh...@operamail.com> wrote:
>According to the Opera 'help' page for the 'history' settings, Opera uses
>disc space to 'store' web pages that you open, so that you can get back to
>them quickly. So the HD /should/ be accessed when you go back to one of
>your 'open' pages.
OK. So it sucks up huge amounts of RAM, and it uses a lot of HD space
:-) I could live with the cache on HD, but it's a pain to have 100MB
of my 512MB be used by Opera simply for holding 20 web static pages.
Strange.
I'm always reluctant to close Opera with all those pages open, and
reopen it, because it sometimes doesn't remember all the pages that
were open and reload them. When it's just too slow, I copy/paste all
the URLs manually in a text file, and reopen them myself. It'd be cool
if Opera could read all the URLs from the clipboard and open them
itself.
Vincent Delporte
>Firefox is far worse. Yes it clearly has memory leaks. FF would have
>used 300-400 MB.
OK. Is it too difficult to run Opera with a memory leak checker, at
least for something as central as loading a few static pages? I don't
have the technical skills to tell, but it shouldn't that hard to spot.
Going from 20MB to 100MB in a few hours by simply leaving Opera open?
We're talking serious memory leaks here :-)
Matthew Winn
I doubt there are any substantial memory leaks. On my Linux system
Opera stays open for months at a time without gobbling up all the
available memory, and this is on a machine with 96MB. If there were
the sort of leaks you keep hinting at then I'd be restarting Opera
every day. You must be doing something to use that memory.
--
Matthew Winn
[If replying by email remove the "r" from "urk"]
Lee Harvey
Are you allowing Opera to allocate this much RAM? In other words, is
Preferences> Advanced tab> History section> Memory cache> set to Automatic?
If so, try choosing something else.
In addition, what plug-ins do you have loaded? View opera:plugins (Tools>
Advanced> Plugins).
Tamiami
All I know is if the Opera developers ever want me to upgrade above
8.5x, they need to fix memory resource allocations. After just
finishing a basic session of surfing, I now have only 10 megs left on a
256MB machine and my swap file is sitting at 160MB. And that's with all
plug-ins DISABLED!!!
Opera is, indeed, a memory hog and has been since versions 6.x.
Vincent Delporte
<o*@matthewwinn.me.urk> wrote:
>You must be doing something to use that memory.
I'm not. Incidentally, I've been seeing this behavior for years now
(started using Opera around 1998 I think), and it shows even on
pristine systems (both on my older W2KSP4 that I haven't reinstalled
in 5 years, and a brand new XPSP2 that I installed recently).
Anyhow, it's just annoying but not bad enough that I'll dump it for
FFox or other alternatives. Opera is faster and feels better.
Vincent Delporte
<leeh...@grassyknoll.com> wrote:
>Are you allowing Opera to allocate this much RAM? In other words, is
>Preferences> Advanced tab> History section> Memory cache> set to Automatic?
>If so, try choosing something else.
Ah ah... By default, it is indeed set to Automatic. I set it to 4MB of
memory cache, and 5MB of disk cache. I'll see how it behaves.
>In addition, what plug-ins do you have loaded? View opera:plugins (Tools>
>Advanced> Plugins).
Standard stuff: Flash, Acrobat, and QuickTime.
Thanks for the input.
Tim Altman
<vincent....@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>On Sat, 27 May 2006 17:18:51 -0700, Bob <b...@bob.con> wrote:
>>Firefox is far worse. Yes it clearly has memory leaks. FF would have
>>used 300-400 MB.
>
>OK. Is it too difficult to run Opera with a memory leak checker, at
>least for something as central as loading a few static pages?
It appears that today is your lucky day. Axel Siebert, Opera's crash
and leak fixer, has created a program called MemGuard that does just
that. Details are available at
http://people.opera.com/axel/memguard.htm.
And to answer other questions in this thread: yes, Opera has memory
leaks. Axel has been fixing several leaks each week for the past
several months. All of the most frequent or serious leaks in Opera
9.0 should now be fixed.
--
Tim Altman
Core QA
Opera Software
Remove NO SPAM from e-mail address to reply
Vincent Delporte
<do....@spam.me.invalid> wrote:
>It appears that today is your lucky day. Axel Siebert, Opera's crash
>and leak fixer, has created a program called MemGuard that does just
>that. Details are available at
>http://people.opera.com/axel/memguard.htm.
Downloaded MemGuard v4.7 as I'm running Opera 8.54, and launched. I'll
see if I can contribute ;-)
Brixomatic
> I've been using Opera for a few years now, but I always wondered why
> it uses so much RAM.
Because RAM is there to be used, not to be idling around.
I don't see any point in having RAM in spare just for the sake of it.
Greets,
-Wanja-
--
"Gewisse Schriftsteller sagen von ihren Werken immer: 'Mein Buch, mein
Kommentar, meine Geschichte'. [..] Es wäre besser, wenn sie sagten:
'unser Buch, unser Kommentar, unsere Geschichte'; wenn man bedenkt, dass
das Gute darin mehr von anderen ist als von ihnen." [Blaise Pascal]
Brixomatic
> >I've heard Opera tends to use 10% of available RAM or so, given that you
> >let it play the automatic game. Using the mailer will also add to the
> >usage. Try playing with the memory cache size (preferences, advanced,
> >history) and see if that helps.
>
> Disk space = 20MB. Very far from 100MB. Result: I can hear the HD
> spinning hard whenever I view pages that I left opened a couple of
> hours before.
That's what you would expect from an operating system: page out data
that has not been recently used, so recently used data can be accessed
quickly.
Where is the difference if the data is taken from virtual memory or from
the HD-cache?
If you don't want caching, disable it.
Vincent Delporte
wrote:
>That's what you would expect from an operating system: page out data
>that has not been recently used, so recently used data can be accessed
>quickly.
But then, I wouldn't expect a web browser to go from 20MB of RAM to
100MB RAM after leaving it open for a couple of hours with about
twenty static web pages... Big memory leaks.
Vincent Delporte
wrote:
>Because RAM is there to be used, not to be idling around.
>I don't see any point in having RAM in spare just for the sake of it.
Unfortunately, it's slowing down other apps. I see nothing wrong with
the _OS_ using up all the unused RAM, but Opera isn't the OS.
Tim Altman
FWIW, running it for 8.54 is pretty useless since memory leaks in that
code branch aren't going to be fixed at this point and many, many
leaks have already been fixed in 9.0. Anything you find will probably
a) have been fixed already or b) won't exist anymore due to code
changes.
Brixomatic
It's an often heard argument that is mostly based on a slight
misunderstanding of how an operating system organizes virtual adress
spaces.
Fact is: Busy pages stay in physical RAM, seldomly used pages will be
paged out. Every modern OS uses this strategy. Since hardly any
application needs all of it's RAM all the time, the busiest application
will get a big share of the physical RAM and thus may work at high
speed.
Since Opera (and most of the other programms around) does not need to
constantly access all the memory it uses and because the old stuff will
be paged out anyway, if another app actively needs RAM and because it
will not be paged in again, until Opera really requests those pages,
it's hardly possible that Opera will noticeably slow down all your
applications by caching pages in RAM and actually not using themfor most
of the time.
So: As soon as the Memory-Pages are paged out, it is the same as if they
were held in a HD-Cache. The only diference between a HD cache and a
memory cache is the persisteny that a RAM cache does not provide.
You'll get a problem when the sum of your Applications are actively
working on more pages than fit into physical RAM, then the OS would be
forced to ride the pagefile like a wild horseman.
What most people seem to forget aswell: what one might think the
operating system provides as "free RAM" may actually be used by the OS
for caching files in the background, so the "free RAM" may not be as
free as one might think.
For more information about paging and stuff you might like to consult
the book "Modern Operating Systems" by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.
Greet,
Vincent Delporte
<do....@spam.me.invalid> wrote:
>FWIW, running it for 8.54 is pretty useless since memory leaks in that
>code branch aren't going to be fixed at this point and many, many
>leaks have already been fixed in 9.0.
OK, I'll upgrade to 9.x. Thx.
Vincent Delporte
wrote:
>Since Opera (and most of the other programms around) does not need to
>constantly access all the memory it uses and because the old stuff will
>be paged out anyway, if another app actively needs RAM and because it
>will not be paged in again, until Opera really requests those pages,
>it's hardly possible that Opera will noticeably slow down all your
>applications by caching pages in RAM and actually not using themfor most
>of the time.
What I _do_ notice, is that it's slow restoring Opera after I left it
open and minimized for a while, and when going through the pages I
left open (trough CTRL-TAB), I can hear the HD spinning hard.
Besides, since Opera (and FFox) is known for its memory leaks, it
bothers me that this app left open goes from using 20MB to using 100MB
of RAM while just sitting there. Do you have an idea to explain this
increase?
Thx.
Brixomatic
> On Wed, 31 May 2006 12:10:47 +0200, Brixomatic <brixo...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> >Since Opera (and most of the other programms around) does not need to
> >constantly access all the memory it uses and because the old stuff will
> >be paged out anyway, if another app actively needs RAM and because it
> >will not be paged in again, until Opera really requests those pages,
> >it's hardly possible that Opera will noticeably slow down all your
> >applications by caching pages in RAM and actually not using themfor most
> >of the time.
>
> What I _do_ notice, is that it's slow restoring Opera after I left it
> open and minimized for a while, and when going through the pages I
> left open (trough CTRL-TAB), I can hear the HD spinning hard.
Expected behaviour.
Windows uses to page out applications that get minimized.
Have a look at the taskmanager with the application open and minimized.
As soon as you minimize the application, it gets paged out. (Windows
semms to suggests that minimized don't get used at the moment, so
they're safe to page out).
I hate this behaviour of Windows, as it really sucks when you use a
large application such as Eclipse.
A good workaround is not to minimize the application but using the
{windows key] + {d} to get the desktop in front, and click the
application you like to see in the taskbar.
Or just use the {alt}+{tab} feature to cycle through the applications.
Greets,
Vincent Delporte
wrote:
>Windows uses to page out applications that get minimized.
OK, but again, I'm not talking about the application being paged out
(which is fine with me, even though my 512MB is hardly ever fully
used), but why does leaving Opera open with a few pages means that its
RAM use will go from 20 to 100MB?
If this is not caused by serious memory leaks (8.54 is the latest
version I found on the site; I'll use 9.x when it's available),
then... what is going on?
Thx.
David W. Hodgins
> If this is not caused by serious memory leaks (8.54 is the latest
> version I found on the site; I'll use 9.x when it's available),
While it is still a beta release, 9.0 beta is avaialble, and
has been very stable for me. As with any beta, if you choose
to try it, make full backups frequently, and assume it may
crash, and lose everything. Hasn't happened yet for me, but
I still make a full backup of my opera data, everytime I close
opera.
See http://snapshot.opera.com/, the newsgroup opera.beta,
the rss feed http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/xml/rss/blog/
and the website http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/
Currently, new beta releases are coming out about once
a week.
Regards, Dave Hodgins
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Vincent Delporte
<dwho...@nomail.afraid.org> wrote:
>While it is still a beta release, 9.0 beta is avaialble, and
>has been very stable for me. As with any beta, if you choose
>to try it, make full backups frequently, and assume it may
>crash, and lose everything.
I'll wait until the final release comes out. I've been living with
Opera's mem leaks for years, I can wait another few weeks :-)
Richard Grevers
<vincent....@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Jun 2006 13:30:43 +0200, Brixomatic <brixo...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>> Windows uses to page out applications that get minimized.
>
> OK, but again, I'm not talking about the application being paged out
> (which is fine with me, even though my 512MB is hardly ever fully
> used), but why does leaving Opera open with a few pages means that its
> RAM use will go from 20 to 100MB?
>
You still haven't indicated what pages you had open. From my experience
most leaks seem to come from advertisements, either because they use
badly-designed flash, or because a script can cause new ads to laod every
couple minutes (and Opera cant really tell whether the ads are something
you want to cache or not).
But my average opera session time is 10 days, so I don't believe the
application is inherently leaky.
--
Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/
Vincent Delporte
<newsr...@dramatic.co.nz> wrote:
>You still haven't indicated what pages you had open.
Indeed, I haven't opened the HTML page to look what it contains, but
they're mostly static (blogs, etc.) Anyhow, I'll see whether release 9
solves this. Thx.