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The Linux distillery Face off: Windows vs Linux real world RAM and disk tests
The Linux distillery Face off: Windows vs Linux real world RAM and disk tests | Face off: Windows vs Linux real world RAM and disk tests |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Tuesday, 22 July 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 4 YouTube is popular, right? Well, even if not, it is a site that hits your computer several ways. Firstly, you’re running a web browser application. Next, you’re loading streaming videos into memory. And thirdly, you’re doing this over a network, naturally.Featured Whitepaper
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Windows jumped up to 1.25GB RAM in use, up 0.13GB or around 133MB. The CPU load fluctuated but mostly hung around 30%. Fedora’s RAM usage increased to 1.4GB, up 348MB. The CPU load was a different story; on the Dell it reached a high of 70% while playing the video. Again, both the higher CPU and RAM usage is largely explained by the lack of onboard video on this computer. Interestingly, closing the web browsers on each computer did not return either exactly to the initial resting state. Fedora lost 5MB of RAM somewhere, settling down to just over the initial 1.06GB RAM in use. Vista stabilised at 1.14GB RAM in use, meaning a loss of some 20MB. Given the only action performed was to start a web browser, visit a site, play a video, then close the browser it seems likely the resulting net gain in memory used is due to software faults leading to memory leaks in the web browsers, or that once we began running programs the operating systems created memory-resident data structures to keep track. Either way, again, Linux demonstrates a tighter use of RAM. How do the browsers compare during a lengthy browsing session? I next loaded 29 different web pages through 30 windows over 11 cycles, giving a total of 319 page loads. I waited three seconds and opened a new window for each page load, closing the oldest window when I got to 30 windows. At the end I closed all windows but one to see if the browser, or operating system, would reclaim memory. I used pavlov.net’s browser buster page to get content. What was very interesting this time was that Internet Explorer’s memory usage soared; it was using over 500MB for its own usage, let alone the rest of the system – and it did not release a single byte of this when all but one window was closed. That memory remained allocated and unavailable. Firefox 3 however increased its memory usage only very slightly on each load, hitting a peak of little over 200MB used by itself. When all pages were closed but one it rested at under 100MB. This meant at the completion of functionally the same exercise, Windows was holding on to 400MB more RAM than Linux. Let’s try something where the video capabilities play very little part, namely writing a letter. To make a comparison I started Microsoft Word 2007 and OpenOffice.org Writer 2.4. To construct a document of several pages with images I also opened iTWire’s home page in a web browser again, pressed CTRL-A to select all text, CTRL-C to copy and then pasted into the word processor via CTRL-V. What happened? CONTINUED |
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