Memory Management
Dateline: Roseville - June 30, 2008 - Bob Towery

A number of us here at Escape subscribe to news feeds from various internet websites that discuss Windows, .Net, and SQL development. This article popped up for me today:

Firefox 3.0 Wins Memory Battle

Since I use both Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers, I checked it out. This links to a developer's article about testing all the current browsers for memory usage. Firefox handily beats the competition. Which is pretty interesting, you would think that Microsoft ought to be able to build a better browser than something from a bunch of individual programmers eh?

I think what it points to is that the Microsoft guys are generally sloppy regarding memory, which as all of you know has been quite a thorn in our users' sides for quite some time. We have spent months trying to improve the memory management that Microsoft should have made right in the first place.

Then I did another little experiment. I'm working at home today. I have had my home computer running all weekend, and I have been using a lot of websites, researching photography, cars, and other things I'm interested in. I'm buying and selling a few things on Ebay. This weekend I was a little busier on the computer than other weekends.

When I'm busy like this, IE will generally crash at least once per day, whereas Firefox crashes perhaps only once per week. I have had about 10 tabs going continually in Firefox, and it didn't crash all weekend. IE crashed both Saturday and Sunday (and it doesn't offer to restore all your tabs like Firefox does after a crash). So after reading the article, I fired up task manager, went to my processes, and sorted by memory usage. Take a look:

Lightroom (Adobe) is the program I use to manage my photography, and it is a big hog. But look at IE and FF. IE has only been running for a few hours, and I have three tabs open. It's using 250 MB, a quarter of a gig! As I mentioned, FF has been running all weekend. What in the world is IE doing with all that memory? It should be noted that our Escape Online 5 program, which deals with much more data than IE, tops out at about 150 mb of memory usage.

I present this information mainly to demonstrate the challenges that Escape faces as a software developer. We use the Microsoft .Net development environment. We do our best!

 

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