Opera eating up lots of RAM

Opera eating up lots of RAM

operaactingweird.png

Hello,

Just curious whether this is happening only with my computer or Opera generally eats up a lot of RAM. In the attached image Opera is using 300MB of my RAM!!! What is this supposed to mean?

You're not alone

Err, what?



I should clarify, I tend to run with an average of about 30 tabs open. So that's probably why mine is so high.

Yeah... I'm running Opera with 5 tabs open right now, and it's using almost 350MB. Seems a bit much. I have had it open for a while (opened and closed many tabs, etc), but still. Do closed tabs use memory?

10.51, W7 Home Premium x64

Originally posted by yourpassenger:

You're not alone

same here with 4 tabs on win7 64bit

What if you minimize, wait a second, and then reopen Opera, does that change anything?

Isn't it good that Opera uses a lot of ram? The less pagefiling that happens the better right? Less read/writes to the hard drive the better I would assume

Originally posted by Cruiser:

What if you minimize, wait a second, and then reopen Opera, does that change anything?

Funny thing. The memory usage fell from 250 MB down to 66 when minimized, and rose to 100 MB when I restored it. Why do you think it does that?

Working sets for minimised windows are trimmed. Then when you restore the window, the process needs some of that memory back, so it reclaims it.

Using lots of memory is good, within reason. When it starts to cause swapping, and slows other processes down as a result, it's not so great. I have my cache limited to 100MB on some PCs, but that seems to make almost no difference to the size of the Opera process in memory, so much of it must be used by the process itself rather than the cache.

A smaller memory footprint was one of the reasons I switched to Opera from FF when FF3.0 came out. I have several machines with less than 1GB of RAM in them, and I don't need my web browser munching it all. Now it looks as if Opera is getting greedier. A sign of the times I suppose when most people have GBs of RAM in their PCs.

Currently sitting on 293MB for 13 tabs.

Not that large on my configured Linux version. Hope it will be still be small when final comes out

40 tabs, 260MB RAM, 430MB virtual memory
on Linux 512MB RAM
settings:
RAM cache 10MB
disk cahce 10MB
remember content on visited pages OFF
Max Connections Server 20
Max Connections Total 20
Network Buffer Size 32
Reduce Max Persistent HTTP Connections OFF
2 IMAP email accounts
2 Feeds
Opera link is ON.

Originally posted by vlatkojk:

Funny thing. The memory usage fell from 250 MB down to 66 when minimized, and rose to 100 MB when I restored it. Why do you think it does that?

Here is one explanation:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/293215
I have several programs that eats ram continuously over time, but falls down to normal if minimized now and then as a part of the normal work flow.
Still, I do not know why my Opera seldom passes 200MB, with Opera filled up with tabs completely, while some of yours seem to explode with only few tabs open. Would be interesting to know what it is in your environment that triggers this reaction.

Opera on Vista/7 will reduce the working set by 5MBs wheras on XP it will go down all the way to under 5MB and slowly rise again,Opera will use alot of memory depending on how much you got but on 32bit there must be a limit put in place now if Opera had a 64bit version they could use more but of course plugins like flash and java increase it tenfold.

Opera has always used a lot of ram which it has held onto even when all tabs are closed.

I don't find the minimise/maximise trick works but getting rid of tabs you no longer want, shutting down Opera and restarting it will cause the memory footprint to shrink dramatically.

It's not really that big a deal in normal use as the unused memory will work its way into the pagefile if it is needed for other purposes but it is a royal pain if you use hibernate as Windows seems to insist on writing all the memory Opera has allocated to the hibernation file which can quadruple the hibernate/wake times.

Originally posted by qpw3141:

Opera has always used a lot of ram which it has held onto even when all tabs are closed.

Damn right - 50Mb is the base load for most of 9. and 10. It can take forever to free once Opera is "closed". This is normally only evident on older machines (such as my old 800Mhz 375Mb ram W2K box) which is why K-meleon and similar "old fashioned" browsers remain popular

Currently using 139M just on this tag, the main forum and speed dial.

I'm very new as Opera user. I noticed that Opera uses more memory than IE 8 for the same sites. Opera have to improve the memory management/usage.

Thanks
-RamaSubbu SK

Originally posted by Thoglette:

Originally posted by qpw3141:

Opera has always used a lot of ram which it has held onto even when all tabs are closed.

Damn right - 50Mb is the base load for most of 9. and 10. It can take forever to free once Opera is "closed". This is normally only evident on older machines (such as my old 800Mhz 375Mb ram W2K box) which is why K-meleon and similar "old fashioned" browsers remain popular

Currently using 139M just on this tag, the main forum and speed dial.

As you suggest its old machine running new software! Stick you old machine running old software and you will be fine!

yes,why this is happened with opera??

Opera (17 tabs open) is using 482 MB on my desktop, but that's less than 10% of my 6 GB of RAM. Isn't that what memory is for, to be used?

Yup, its using way too much ram. I'm still using the version from 2 years ago. Opera 8.5

Originally posted by k0asati:

Opera (17 tabs open) is using 482 MB on my desktop, but that's less than 10% of my 6 GB of RAM. Isn't that what memory is for, to be used?

well you still people running windows 95 and expecting opera 10.50 to work on it, plus flash!

Originally posted by Thoglette:

It can take forever to free once Opera is "closed". This is normally only evident on older machines...

Not only on older machines. Well, my computer is not the latest and greatest, but it's an Athlon64 3800 with 2GB RAM. I'm in the habit of keeping Opera started and minimised, so as to easier get links open. And when I close it, like before shutting down, it can take more than 30 seconds (almost up to a minute) for Opera to disappear from the processes. At the same time, Opera occupies only about 60 MB RAM. Memory hogs like Photoshop release the memory almost immediately.

Athlon64 3800 with 2GB RAM = old machine!

Do you still have this problem on high RAM usage in 10.52 builds?

Any modern browser is going to use a hundred megs of RAM and up just sitting around. Anyone who says otherwise is still running IE6.

You want a solution? Buy more RAM. It's a purchase you can literally only regret if you cheapskate on it and buy a terrible off-brand which burns out in a week, otherwise, it has no downside.

>You want a solution? Buy more RAM

What if you are using a laptop, and your machine is limited to max. 1 GB (my case)? Buy another laptop? What if you are using a laptop, and don't want to buy memory which is usually much more expensive than desktop's (almost all laptops have the same issue...)?
The race to consumption is rubbish, and having the ability to add more RAM is not an excuse for modern programming manners which make software need more and more and more ressources under the pretext of speed gain.... The speed gain exist only for those who either already have a lot of RAM, or want to buy more. Those who are not in this case are screwed.
10.51 using 250 MB here as I type, with 6 tabs open.

High ram usage is normal. Opera is using what's there to best effect. If something else needs it, the OS memory manager will hand it back to something else.

Do people really want sucky performance and unused RAM sat doing nothing?

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

limited to max. 1 GB...
10.51 using 250 MB here as I type, with 6 tabs open.

You seriously need to get more RAM; 250 megs barely gets you XP. Now the "race to consume" is one thing, especially where software is concerned: as Windows has so clearly shown us with its last two debac... I mean, operating systems, newer isn't necessarily better; usually different and worse in a thousand tiny ways.

RAM has no such drawbacks; RAM simply is. It's not a discretionary expense (relative to computing) like a video card or web camera would be, RAM is a bottom-line essential. As a type of hardware RAM doesn't go obsolete or pull confusing and idiotic UI changes to stay hip; perhaps its particular physical type goes obsolete, and the amount, but not RAM itself. It's also dirt cheap. It's not even like gasoline in that you have to regularly replenish it; you plug it in and it's there. Having it benefits everything - your OS, your programs, your games, your browsers. The only excuse for not maxing out your RAM is having absolutely no liquid assets, in which case you need to stop posting on the internet right away and get a second job.

As well, the more you procrastinate on maxing out the RAM for that laptop of yours, the more expensive and difficult it's going to be to get it. How old is that computer? If the type of RAM it uses now is even still available, do you think it'll be around in another 2-4 years? Frankly, I'd hurry.

Demanding that Opera optimize its software so it can run on something that has less RAM than your average video card these days is a disservice to everyone - it forces the company to turn inward and pinch pennies in terms of its software design instead of finding ways to expand its functionality in useful ways or market it to others, or fix actual real problems with the software. You demand they spend all that time and effort when you won't keep your computer's abilities up to pace with 2004? That's outta line to me.

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

>You want a solution? Buy more RAM

What if you are using a laptop, and your machine is limited to max. 1 GB (my case)? Buy another laptop? What if you are using a laptop, and don't want to buy memory which is usually much more expensive than desktop's (almost all laptops have the same issue...)?
The race to consumption is rubbish, and having the ability to add more RAM is not an excuse for modern programming manners which make software need more and more and more ressources under the pretext of speed gain.... The speed gain exist only for those who either already have a lot of RAM, or want to buy more. Those who are not in this case are screwed.
10.51 using 250 MB here as I type, with 6 tabs open.

1. you don't want to change
2. you demand others make changes in your favor

You can bitch/complain/whines as much u like, cause the memory consumption will never be going down again. If you got a old laptop, then use old software. PROBLEM SOLVED! Opera have every single release of their browser, got find one that works your old laptop...

If you want the worlds more faster browser then try lynx. Lynx make your old laptop and new old again!

So how soon before we have a RC of Opera 10.50 which doesn't stop your machine working or grind it to a halt because of these memory issues.
Surely someone must have thought of them before the release?
I've gone back to 10.10 which had 5 downloads, 3 windows open, a media player in the background and didn't even flinch! I also downloaded a 45mb file n the time Firefox took to boot up!
Please get the memory issues sorted, but let's get to getting more people to use Opera as their browser of choice, because hopefully they'll use it for a while and realise that Opera is what was missing from their web experience

Untitled.jpg Untitled.jpg

1 tab on 10.51, opera has been minimized for 30 min

It's OK for Opera to use as much RAM as possible most of the time, but now it's not just using ALL the RAM but more than what my PC can offer... The VM just keep bubble up & Opera won't released 'em without a restart, it cause my PC to constantly slowdown, hang, & freeze... This is ridiculous, it remind me of Firefox 2. Constant freezing, lag, & crashes are the reasons I dump Firefox & look for Opera years ago.

Please fix this memory problem ASAP, I can't really help you BETA test this browser if it doesn't even function properly most of the time...

>You seriously need to get more RAM; 250 megs barely gets you XP

I have 1 GB; 250MB is what Opera uses for the 6 tabs that were used when I posted it. During what I call normal usage (~50 open tabs), it goes up to 700 MB or so......

>Demanding that Opera optimize its software so it can run on something that has less RAM than your average video card these days etc etc etc

Before you say such things, think of people living in third-world or not so-third-world countries, to whom a pentium II is a high-end machine. There are many more of those than you or me, being lucky enough to afford new components every once in a while. This is one point. The second point is that optimising algorithms to make them faster and less memory-intensive (it usually goes together) benefits everyone, and goes exactly in your direction - the more ressource-friendly it is, the more features you can add while keeping it fast (including loading / closing time, need for swap etc., not only rendering time) and small.

>1. you don't want to change

Indeed, I don't want to buy more and more stuff just because some clueless chap like you decided that *all* new software use more ressources than the older, which is not true - if you look at the changelog of many programs (here is one at random: XYplorer), you'll see that the line "reduced memory usage" comes back often. And that's good! Contrary to popular belief, using up more meory doesn't mean the program is more efficient.
Of course, some people can never understand why some other don't want to buy more stuff, and they make it an attack against their theory that whatever is new is good, that "you must change" because "change is always good" or whatever rot. But, you see, there is no ideology in my words, and I frankly don't care whether you worship change or not - it is your problem.
Let me repeat: the point, is that I don't want to buy another laptop, because the panasonic CF-R4 is a nice machine, because mine works great and because I have other use for money than filling up a cupboard with discarded, yet still working, computer parts. I indeed don't believe I am alone in that case, and the number of posts concerning ressource usage tends to second that.

>2. you demand others make changes in your favor

Actually I was just about to ask you to change as well and to stop behaving like a small child, but perhaps I should demand that you do it in my favour?

I will end the digression by stating something very evident, which fanboys always forget, or dismiss, or deny - what makes software fast is how fast *you* can use it, not how fast synthetic test abc said it was when run on a super-high-end machine - swapping because it uses lots of memory is a cause for making it slow, if only because it will make its use very difficult along other apps (I suppose most of us use several programs at a time, or don't we?)....

Cheers

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

I have 1 GB; 250MB is what Opera uses for the 6 tabs that were used when I posted it. During what I call normal usage (~50 open tabs), it goes up to 700 MB or so......

50 tabs open and you have 1GB of ram. Why don't u demand opera to have 1000+ tabs open and have 250mb of ram...time to support out of date machine opera!

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

Before you say such things, think of people living in third-world or not so-third-world countries, to whom a pentium II is a high-end machine. There are many more of those than you or me, being lucky enough to afford new components every once in a while. This is one point. The second point is that optimising algorithms to make them faster and less memory-intensive (it usually goes together) benefits everyone, and goes exactly in your direction - the more ressource-friendly it is, the more features you can add while keeping it fast (including loading / closing time, need for swap etc., not only rendering time) and small.

oi, all you stupid gaming companies what are u been so moneycist! can't you see there all there people who can only run a P2 eh? Why not make world of warcraft run on P2 or even my old 486? You know optimizing the game to run on old hardware will get your more players?

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

Indeed, I don't want to buy more and more stuff just because some clueless chap like you decided that *all* new software use more ressources than the older, which is not true - if you look at the changelog of many programs (here is one at random: XYplorer), you'll see that the line "reduced memory usage" comes back often. And that's good! Contrary to popular belief, using up more meory doesn't mean the program is more efficient.
Of course, some people can never understand why some other don't want to buy more stuff, and they make it an attack against their theory that whatever is new is good, that "you must change" because "change is always good" or whatever rot. But, you see, there is no ideology in my words, and I frankly don't care whether you worship change or not - it is your problem.
Let me repeat: the point, is that I don't want to buy another laptop, because the panasonic CF-R4 is a nice machine, because mine works great and because I have other use for money than filling up a cupboard with discarded, yet still working, computer parts. I indeed don't believe I am alone in that case, and the number of posts concerning ressource usage tends to second that.

Yeah my employer, your employing a clueless chap and paying him $US200k to write programs for you. You got a raw deal.

If(cludefull_chap wants more features) 
then upgrade the hardware 
else stay if your 468 and run linux kernel with text mode

If i look at 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the programs today they use more memory. Stupid programmers why not program your programs so it can run on my 486? Why team up with hardware companies so they make new hardware and thus need new software eh? why not just stick to the 486 with 64k of ram?

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

Actually I was just about to ask you to change as well and to stop behaving like a small child, but perhaps I should demand that you do it in my favour?

I will end the digression by stating something very evident, which fanboys always forget, or dismiss, or deny - what makes software fast is how fast *you* can use it, not how fast synthetic test abc said it was when run on a super-high-end machine - swapping because it uses lots of memory is a cause for making it slow, if only because it will make its use very difficult along other apps (I suppose most of us use several programs at a time, or don't we?)....

Cheers

I am a child you adult! There nothing wrong with behaving like a child when you are one...Children still open mind for the changing world ahead. Adult cluefull chaps have their way declare and engrave in stone and do not want to change. Why even bother with using a computer cluefull chap? stick with pen and paper

I will end my regression by stating something very evident, which fan-adults always forget, or dismiss, or deny - what makes computers faster are new hardware and new software. If all else fails just run lynx...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...RUN LYNX...

P.S geee adults still insult others when they in a debate...that what children like me do!

Originally posted by ritmocafe:

Stupid programmers why not program your programs so it can run on my 486?

Now, that is a very good question.

Originally posted by vlatkojk:

Originally posted by ritmocafe:

Stupid programmers why not program your programs so it can run on my 486?

Now, that is a very good question.

I wish people started demanding that we can real time decode h264 on their 486's!

the computer industry is always in constant change and sometimes that means sacrifices must be made for the greater good, do you ppl realize there are settings that you can change. but perhaps if opera made 2 versions, a stripped down version aimed for minimal memory usage but less features/enhancements and the 2nd would be for higher memory use but more/extensive features/enhancements. the main problem with opera is actualy not with opera but the plugins that sites use like flash, lifehacker for example uses heavy flash and each tab will increase the browsers memory use so go after the plugin developers first.

Have you ever thought that now the websites are heavier than before and that's why a big % of the memory used by the new versions of the web browsers are due to web standards support improvements and pages developed with more rich content?

my opera is using 320 mb right now with 9 tabs on windows 7... got 4 gig ram, but i still wonder, WHAT all this ram is used on...

I'm not sure if this is useful, but after my post earlier I reinstalled 10.10, then curiously a few days later re-upgraded back to 10.51 from which point the memory glitch totally disappeared! It runs occasionally slower, but otherwise back to glorious normal.
Weird, or is there a link (& not an Opera link) here?
Morning to you all & warm regards
Andy

Originally posted by pixartist:

my opera is using 320 mb right now with 9 tabs on windows 7... got 4 gig ram, but i still wonder, WHAT all this ram is used on...

You have 4 GB RAM and you are worried about 320 MB? Geez. Opera uses 10% of your RAM for its memory cache alone! You should definitely not be posting in this thread. 300 MB out of 4 GB is NOTHING.

Upgraded Opera 10.51 from 10.10 on WinXPSP2(1GB RAM) and memory usage has gone up a lot but performance is noticeably faster, doesn't slow PC down, its all good. You can't have everything - obviously the extra ram usage is for increasing performance - although some of the amounts stated above do seem ridiculous.

But, on my old Win2K laptop with only 190MB RAM, the extra RAM demands of 10.51 are creating a lot of virtual mem increases with only a few tabs open and maybe explorer open. Opera 10.51 process also takes a very long time to shutdown. So, its no longer great on resource limited devices.

Listen, I had a new thought today!!

You are using a slow computer (old PC), so you must be using Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP (or any other old OS you can think: older Linux version, etc. [simply old software]), but when it comes to a web browser you want to run the latest version without "problems"??? You should be using an older version of Opera (as you are using an older version of OS) instead of protest against 10.5x and higher...

@rafaelluik
If your post was in reply to mine, you should realise that it wasn't a "protest against 10.5x and higher". You should read the post properly, I was just stating my experience of the newer technology. People here ARE allowed to let others know what sort of performance to expect from newer browser versions on older hardware. Some people even try to get as newer a version of Opera running as their hardware will allow; although you could say they are being very selfish, it is usually for the extra security, bug fixes, functionality, & website accessibility that the later versions provide. Although, as a fanboy, I applaud the fact that you were able to have a new thought, have you considered that new thoughts should be allowed to be intercepted by old thoughts before they are typed out to the world?

Using over 800k plus over 860k virtual memory. Of course I have 85 tabs open. A bit more [tabs] than I expected. But it is using more memory than it used to.

@aceChipping
My post wasn't in reply to yours - consciously -, I was really just taking off a thought from my mind.
LOL the end of your post was really very funny! I'm trying to not to think much before doing or saying things, that would make me live speechless, that isn't a good thing to feel. :clown:

Originally posted by integrator:

it is usually for the extra security, bug fixes, functionality, & website accessibility that the later versions provide.

My thought applies to what you said here: we - unfortunately - have to live with the fact that updating the OS would give more security, fix bugs, increase functionality, website accessibility applications compatibility, etc, but we (hypothetically) can't update because upgrading the OS would require money for better hardware or it'd run slow. But when people think about a web browser they want it works at the normal speed in a 256 MB RAM PC without wasting any money...

Originally posted by aceChipping:

although you could say they are being very selfish

definitely they are not, I think I would ask for the same thing: "give me the latest version of <insert OS here>, make it run in my old PC, no slow motion please", that's how everyone would want it, but it mightn't be possible...

>My thought applies to what you said here: we - unfortunately - have to live with the fact that updating the OS would give more security, fix bugs, >increase functionality, website accessibility applications compatibility, etc, but we (hypothetically) can't update because upgrading the OS would >require money for better hardware or it'd run slow. But when people think about a web browser they want it works at the normal speed in a 256 MB >RAM PC without wasting any money...

Hm, actually I don't think it's true - upgrading your OS usually degrades compatibility (because older apps stop functioning - for instance, if I want to run some old DOS games or apps properly under XP I need to use DOSBox and VDMsound), and very often introduces new security issues (see eg when the first XP was released). New functionality (the which you do get with a new OS, though it's not always so striking - XP does have a lot of new features if you compare it with W95, but is vista *so* different from XP in terms of features?) also often introduce bugs. In the end, it's a bit like starting from scratch again (not that bad, though) - you change the kernel, the OS' core, so you have to rewrite it and there come thousands of opportunities for bugs to creep in
Upgrading OS is not actually done all the time whenever a new version is release, many people stick with what they have just because they needn't get anything new for what they do. A complaint many people had about vista was that it was too slow, took too long to load etc., which makes it difficult to use on a low-end PC. W7, on the other hand, is less ressource-consuming. And many don't see the point in upgrading from XP to anything new right now.
On the other hand, try disable visual effects in vista of w7, and you will be able to run it smoothly on a lower-end machine - so sometimes it's not the content (functionality) that makes it slower but rather the wrapping (not even sheer interface, in this context just eye-candy).
The trade-off is different. You might upgrade your OS to get say 64 bit support, because you absolutely need it, and then buying new hardware can be justified, it's a long-term investment. But buying new hardware to run a web browser, I'm not sure many would do it (even fanboys), and that's why people often ask that opera be less ressource-intensive, because as much as the security and bug fixes are important (so upgrading IS important in that respect), in the end it's just an app among thousands of others. People are always happy to get new features, usually as long as they can disable them, they don't drastically change their habits wrt their use of the software, and it doesn't make anything slower on their current machine.
As for me, I consider a browser as I do my antivirus - I absolutely need it and want it to be fast and unintrusive so that it allows me to do some other work at the same time, and I want it to work well. If the new version of my antivirus uses twice as much RAM as it used to and makes the system swap, or constantly forgets that I asked it to quarantine and not to delete forever infected files etc., I will consider that the tool is not practical enough and just change it, the same for opera or any other piece of software I use, and probably the same for most computer users.
Cheers

1.

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

upgrading your OS usually degrades compatibility (because older apps stop functioning - for instance, if I want to run some old DOS games or apps properly under XP I need to use DOSBox and VDMsound)

One example on my side: DirectX.

2. I don't know why people talk bad things about Vista, it's ok. Win7 system requirements are higher than Vista.

3.

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

I will consider that the tool is not practical enough and just change it, the same for opera or any other piece of software I use

You have the choice to leave Opera now, but it's temporary, we're moving in a direction which all (non-text-only / featureless) web browsers will use a lot of system resources.

You are right about DirectX, but it's not really an OS, more like a part of it - but you have a point. I thought you meant installing a new OS (such has swapping XP for w7).
And you are also right saying that all web browsers (and for that matter, most applications) are going in this direction, but I think we should try to stop it by demanding lightweight applications.
In some way, Chrome has done a lot in this regard - it does eat RAM, but less than Opera and it also loads/close much, much more quickly.
(Strangely, I've also found that Opera loads/closes much more rapidly under linux that windows, but never understood why..)
Cheers

What do you mean by "loads/closes"?

Well, in the old days, one of the main draws of Opera (for me anyway) was that it was compact and fast (a little bit what Chrome is trying to do). It would run on virtually anything. I'm not complaining about it getting bigger. Its necessary, as you point out, because the web has become more 'bells and whistles and sparkly things'. I just loved Opera's versatility, and just for that nostalgia and nothing else, I will try to run it on old h/w. Ofcourse, its still relatively the best browser, regardless of version, for resource limited devices. Sadly, its been a struggle for Opera to work with various websites, to the point that it has interefered with web use (for me). So, its been necessary to upgrade to reduce this problem (more than any other thing)(and its not Opera's fault).

My experience of Vista has been ok. It runs ok with default install on a PC with 1.5 GHz/1GB RAM (although I haven't loaded it much). I think the main problems people had were with the earlier versions interfering with user operations and in compatibility problems - forcing some users to want to end their lives. It has got some big new things in it (e.g. the version tracking/compatibility tracking/rollback of drivers and files), and ofcourse, improving security and reliability by restricting users and treating them like babies. The last bit causing a MAJOR pain for administrators (and leading many users to disable the protections). So the new things are there but they're not really wanted enough to justify the pain. My (uneducated) opinion is that W7 is mostly just a tidying up and fixing of Vista to make it more pallatable for corporates to upgrade from XP - a marketing tactic to get them looking at upgrading again because sales must have been dropping.

>What do you mean by "loads/closes"?
I mean, when you double click opera.exe you have to wait x seconds until the window appears, and when you click the close button you need to wait y seconds (usually y is large, on my laptop can be up to 20-25 seconds) until the opera process vanishes from memory.

>because the web has become more 'bells and whistles and sparkly things'.
Hm, you are right, but maybe not all the web has changed this way. At least, in my experience of the web (the websites I visit etc.), bells and whistles are mostly annoying because almost all the time they are used for showing ads or blinking content or whatever (so flash for instance I now disable by default), so they don't really serve any useful purpose. As you say, supporting such things is necessary, but as you also pointed out chrome does it whilst being fast and compact, and this is where opera is now lacking, I think.

Cheers

Originally posted by mgillespie:

High ram usage is normal. Opera is using what's there to best effect. If something else needs it, the OS memory manager will hand it back to something else.

Do people really want sucky performance and unused RAM sat doing nothing?

At work, I use an old Pentium IV PC with only 512MB RAM and Windows 2000. It's fast enough for the stuff I do at work, and until Opera 10.50, it also had enough RAM for that.

But that has changed since Opera 10.50. After browsing for a time, Opera takes up 300-350MB of the 512MB, which makes all programs slow down enormously because of intense page file use.

Firefox does not have any memory issue at all. I prefer to use the latest Opera version, but it's RAM usage causes a big problem. I need to close and re-open Opera after a while, so that the PC remains usable. It's not efficient at all.

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

As you say, supporting such things is necessary, but as you also pointed out chrome does it whilst being fast and compact, and this is where opera is now lacking, I think.

[going briefly off-topic] But , on the other hand, Opera excels in having a good content blocking facility. It has helped me many times to speed up sites that are slowed by badly implemented adverts.

I absolutely agree!
Now I just leave flash off, too much junk... enable it only when it's needed.
Cheers

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

when you click the close button you need to wait y seconds (usually y is large, on my laptop can be up to 20-25 seconds) until the opera process vanishes from memory.

hm, ok...

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

Now I just leave flash off, too much junk... enable it only when it's needed.

yep, opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableOnDemandPlugin is great for slow computers.

Why doesn't Opera as a company publish a study with Opera 10.50 memory usage??

It seems very clear that Opera 10.50 in fact uses more memory than other browser during normal usage. Nothing wrong in using more memory but it would be nice for Opera as a company to show WHY Opera 10.50 uses more memory.

Following are some points for discussion:
1)Benefits of more memory usage (if any)
2)The reason for heavy memory usage (if any)
3)Ways to alter memory usage behavior (if any)
4)etc...

What you people think?

Originally posted by rushad0:

What you people think?

I like your questions.
I'd be interesting, I think something like this was never done by any company / developer (and may never be done).

Originally posted by rushad0:

3)Ways to alter memory usage behavior (if any)

That would be the only useful answer in my view.

I'm not interested in browser performance competitions, I just want to be able to make Opera work normally on computers with less than 1GB of RAM. And this should also be in the interest of the company.

Thanks for understanding the need of such a memory study.

What ends up happening is some fanboys throw out ideas and we actually never get an official response from Opera, the company. What we hear are just thoughts of users.

One example is, minimizing reduces memory usage. Well quiet frankly, it doesn't for any of my computers. Closing tab never reduces memory, minimizing never reduces memory, on any of computers or windows operating systems. If this is actual behavior, I would like to hear from Opera developers and not fanboys.

Originally posted by Ornette:

That would be the only useful answer in my view.



I'm not interested in browser performance competitions, I just want to be able to make Opera work normally on computers with less than 1GB of RAM. And this should also be in the interest of the company.

These are just some suggestions, food for thought per say.
It would be nice we call together can come up with some good ideas for the developers to look at.

I'd definitely now appreciate some simple way of controlling the memory usage.

Opera 10.52 rc5 still suffer from memory management problem... The browser keep hogging memory & doesn't released 'em, & I have to keep restarting the browser every hour... This is just like Firefox 2 years ago!


Please Opera developers, fixed this memory problem before declaring 10.52 final.

Originally posted by aceChipping:

Well, in the old days, one of the main draws of Opera (for me anyway) was that it was compact and fast (a little bit what Chrome is trying to do). It would run on virtually anything. I'm not complaining about it getting bigger. Its necessary, as you point out, because the web has become more 'bells and whistles and sparkly things'. I just loved Opera's versatility, and just for that nostalgia and nothing else, I will try to run it on old h/w. Ofcourse, its still relatively the best browser, regardless of version, for resource limited devices. Sadly, its been a struggle for Opera to work with various websites, to the point that it has interefered with web use (for me). So, its been necessary to upgrade to reduce this problem (more than any other thing)(and its not Opera's fault).

My experience of Vista has been ok. It runs ok with default install on a PC with 1.5 GHz/1GB RAM (although I haven't loaded it much). I think the main problems people had were with the earlier versions interfering with user operations and in compatibility problems - forcing some users to want to end their lives. It has got some big new things in it (e.g. the version tracking/compatibility tracking/rollback of drivers and files), and ofcourse, improving security and reliability by restricting users and treating them like babies. The last bit causing a MAJOR pain for administrators (and leading many users to disable the protections). So the new things are there but they're not really wanted enough to justify the pain. My (uneducated) opinion is that W7 is mostly just a tidying up and fixing of Vista to make it more pallatable for corporates to upgrade from XP - a marketing tactic to get them looking at upgrading again because sales must have been dropping.

Maybe what they should try to do is have an Opera Lite or something, a pared down version much like the earlier versions, that uses less memory, etc. That would be great.

Originally posted by dude09:

Opera 10.52 rc5 still suffer from memory management problem... The browser keep hogging memory & doesn't released 'em, & I have to keep restarting the browser every hour... This is just like Firefox 2 years ago!


Please Opera developers, fixed this memory problem before declaring 10.52 final.

Confirmed: PC slows down, 10.52 RC5 stops responding, then I notice that, with 4 or 5 tabs open, RAM is 7MB (out of 1GB!).
Eventually manage to close Opera, then after about a minute of disk activity the RAM goes up to >600MB. With the other apps. open I'd expect the RAM to be ~500MB without Opera.
After that, all apps. open are slow as they're on disk and not in RAM and closing down takes almost twice as long for the same reason.

With 10.10, with 12 tabs open, I usually have ~400MB of RAM unless I do a lot in the browser - that'll take another 50 or so.

RAM is, atm, stopping me from using 10.5x as default.

Originally posted by yourpassenger:

You're not alone

I got less here on Windows XP.

Opera with nine tabs opened :



The same as above after it was minimized and then immediately restored :



Note : I have “just” 1G RAM (which is very much to my eyes) and I suspect Opera to use more memory as there is more memory available on the system. The same Opera 9 was allocating more memory on my new Windows XP with 1G and less on my old Windows 98 with 48M. Same version and different amount of memory allocation.

If it's allocating memory depending on what's available, as I suspect it to do, then there is no trouble

Originally posted by ritmocafe:

well you still people running windows 95 and expecting opera 10.50 to work on it, plus flash!

With Windows 98, Opera 8.x is a better choice. And Flash should be disabled anyway on Windows 98, as this makes all the system unstable.

I use to have Windows 98 during many years ; when I've tried Opera 9 on this system, I've discovered it was not a good idea. I also remember I had to disable Flash to avoid crashes which was otherwise happening each time I was landing on a page using Flash for content or ads.

Originally posted by Hibou57:

The same as above after it was minimized and then immediately restored :

my point exactly. minimizing doesn't release RAM for any of my PCs. Hence, I would like to hear an official statement from Opera developers.

Originally posted by Hibou57:

Note : I have “just” 1G RAM (which is very much to my eyes) and I suspect Opera to use more memory as there is more memory available on the system. The same Opera 9 was allocating more memory on my new Windows XP with 1G and less on my old Windows 98 with 48M. Same version and different amount of memory allocation.

If it's allocating memory depending on what's available, as I suspect it to do, then there is no trouble

That's not my experience. On both may home (3GB, Vista) and work (512MB, Win 2000) PC, Opera uses 300-350MB RAM after some time, depending on the sites I visit.

I have not found a way to make Opera use less RAM. The cache setting seems to have no impact. The only way to make RAM temporarily available to other programs is to close Opera and reopen it.

>If it's allocating memory depending on what's available, as I suspect it to do, then there is no trouble

not my experience as well, unfortunately. On my 1GB laptop, Opera often goes over the 500MB limit.
Cheers

Originally posted by Ornette:

That's not my experience. On both may home (3GB, Vista) and work (512MB, Win 2000) PC, Opera uses 300-350MB RAM after some time, depending on the sites I visit.

I have not found a way to make Opera use less RAM. The cache setting seems to have no impact. The only way to make RAM temporarily available to other programs is to close Opera and reopen it.

There must be a trick somewhere, and not sure it's Opera's fault, as after multiple hours Opera's opened with multiple tabs, I still have no more than 150 to 180M allocated by the browser.

What about other applications on the same platforms ?

May be some plug-ins ?

May be the kind of site you are landing on ?

Does the sites you visit make heavy use of JavaScript or something like that ? Well, by the way, I oftenly use a web application, my own on-line editor Lasidoré, whose main JavaScript is not less than 1M in its uncompressed version, and Opera still does not consume so much memory even with such a heavy JavaScript application loaded.

Flash may be ?

I'm pretty sure there's is a trick somewhere…

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

>If it's allocating memory depending on what's available, as I suspect it to do, then there is no trouble

not my experience as well, unfortunately. On my 1GB laptop, Opera often goes over the 500MB limit.
Cheers

Does it simply happens, while perhaps not so much oftenly, or is it really common ?

“just happens sometime” and “happens all the time” are not the same things.

What’s the frequency of the memory consumption you are pointing out ?

>What’s the frequency of the memory consumption you are pointing out ?
I haven't got very precise stats at hand, but I would say it goes over 500MB at least 80% of the time, so I'd call it really common. Otherwise it lingers around 3-400 MB. Right now, it's using 538 MB. I have just powered on my computer and have 13 tabs open. 12 were re-opened from last session, the 13rd contains this page. One of the tab is the M2 window (have 4 accounts + 6 RSS there).
I have tried numerous combinations (plug-ins ON/OFF, M2 ON/OFF etc etc.) but changes are not so drastic... I find I usually save ~30MB when plug-ins are disabled, about the same for M2 - even with 60 less MB it's still around the 470 MB mark, which is very high.
Cheers

Do you run Vista/Seven or XP ?

I wonder if there are differences when one switch from XP to Vista or Seven.

Note that when comparing similar applications on both XP and Vista/Seven, memory consumption, after some benchmarks, seems always higher with Vista/Seven (a bit less with Seven), even for such simple things as zipping a directory, copying files of one folder to another and so on. I'm not using Vista nor Seven, I still use XP, this is just that I oftenly read such stories about the two last versions of Windows.

I would like to help if I could

I use XP SP3. I have seen this behaviour on (very) different machines.
Thanks a lot for willing to help I am sure there are things to be done, but for the most part my guess would be that it must be done at the core, by the developpers.
Cheers.

flash has a nasty habit of gobbling up tons of memory, if you remove the old one and try the beta one that may fix it,what about having opera manage the memory cache and turn off the disk cache? try these sites they may help http://operawiki.info/OperaPerformance and http://help.opera.com/Windows/10.51/en/history.html

Thanks for the links!
I already have the disk cache OFF, and the memory usage I report is without any plug-in enabled (no java, no flash, etc.) - add 30-40 more MB if they are enabled. I have a 20MB RAM cache.
Thankd and cheers

What do you have when you start a cession without any initial tabs ?

Originally posted by Hibou57:

What do you have when you start a cession without any initial tabs ?

Seriously... wrong forums buddy!!!! This post is about Opera using more memory.

But still... there is an option in preferences (around home page setup) that let's you do what you desire.

>What do you have when you start a cession without any initial tabs ?

~ 220MB - that's still a lot!
Cheers

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

>What do you have when you start a cession without any initial tabs ?

with no tabs, it's about 75MB for me.
with gmail open, it's about 150MB for me.

I really hope memory consumption has improved in Opera 10.52. only time will tell!!!

Originally posted by rushad0:

with no tabs, it's about 75MB for me.

with gmail open, it's about 150MB for me.

I think there is any problem with the debugger opera in ajax. In other browser, memory don´t pass with 80mb with gmail open. Chrome use 50mb to load this page.
After use gmail for few minutes or hours, performance worsens.
I dont use gmail with opera.

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

>What do you have when you start a cession without any initial tabs ?

~ 220MB - that's still a lot!
Cheers

Strange indeed…

I heard to say Opera 10.52 is to come soon. May be this gonna be different with this release and the fixes which will come with it.

Originally posted by robsonpc:

I think there is any problem with the debugger opera in ajax. In other browser, memory don´t pass with 80mb with gmail open. Chrome use 50mb to load this page.

After use gmail for few minutes or hours, performance worsens.

I dont use gmail with opera.

Wait, you really wanted Google improved GMail performance in Opera like they did with Chrome?^{[citation needed]}

Originally posted by rafaelluik:

Wait, you really wanted Google improved GMail performance in Opera like they did with Chrome?

Yes because Firefox(too) has great performance in google services.

Originally posted by robsonpc:

Yes because Firefox(too) has great performance in google services.

Isn't Firefox the old Google partner?

Originally posted by rafaelluik:

Isn't Firefox the old Google partner?

I know this is not always possible but the guys have a solution and we do not.
Yes, google is stupid but they do not have a policy of not being evil?
What about cover that?

I don't really see a problem with this. I've got 3GB of RAM. Use it.

>I don't really see a problem with this. I've got 3GB of RAM. Use it.
The problem is when you want to run several applications *at the same time* on a (relatively!) low end machine, or one that is memory-limited (lots of laptops).
The main argument against not being happy with opera's RAM usage is, "you have memory, just use it, more RAM used by a programme makes it faster". In some cases (not all), this is true, but it's valid for the given application only.
Here is a practical example. You have a system that has 2 GB of RAM installed. You run application x, which runs optimally when using 1.5GB of RAM. In the end, you have 500MB left for the OS AND the other programmes you use, which is enough for light office use and absolutely not for basically anything else. Yes, application x, when run ON ITS OWN on your machine, will be very fast, but very few people run only one application at a time, and the OS needs ressources, too. Let's say application x is opera - it's fine for a kiosk machine that will run ONLY opera; it's not fine for the average user who multitasks and will quickly realise their system swaps...
The point is, saying "using more RAM is better" is junk, or partial at best - it can, maybe, not always, make YOUR application faster, but at the cost of overall system usability, as it will reduce your abilty to run several applications at the same time and decrease your system's responsiveness - unless of course you have a ultra high-end machine. Most people don't, and have better use for their time and money than upgrading their computers.
Cheers.

10.10 doesn't use all of the RAM and works very well. 10.52 'normally' uses about 2x and is about the same as 10.10 in use.

Twice yesterday 10.52 ran me down to 3MB left! - Things get a bit sluggish at that point!

I can repeat this now:

Yahoo Search will do it. Go to http://tinyurl.com/2bolgou (images of Ben Nevis), click on one of the images, let the page load fully. The RAM might drop to a very low figure; if not, try scrolling with the wheel in the lower frame.

I'd be interested to see what happens on other machines. It doesn't happen in Google (but I don't like Google) or with Firefox in Yahoo.

Originally posted by GeeZuS:

I don't really see a problem with this. I've got 3GB of RAM. Use it.

you're missing the point. just because you have a lot of money doesn't mean you waste it!!! same with RAM.

we need to know why exactly does Opera use a load of memory. But i must admit, 10.52 is in fact a significant improvement.

People, don't forget "VM size" memory usage (quickly saw people only listing "mem usage" figures).

Check this, it's not exactly related but to some degree (memory & resource leakage and/or RAM usage). (I guess it's my response to those who say "RAM, if you got it, (let it) use it" )

(I'm not going to subscribe to this topic, nor follow any responses to this post, sorry, got to lower the "digital life" time spent, real life is elsewhere. )

And this link >> http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=498851

PS: The worst is that the program does not know when to stop using the memory. It uses up the machine runs out of resources and freeze!
In win xp does not have many bugs but the performace is horrible at times.

Opera 10.53 is there, try it, this may be better

Originally posted by fefrie:

fefrie

Yes and no. You're right about the read/write on the hdd but don't also forget that there are other essential processes running at this time that need this memory too in order to be fast enough not to turn your computer into a lazy slug. So when Opera "steals" almost all of it, the other programms have to use the PF, which is slower and uses the hdd.

By the way, I see the same with 10.50, 10.51, 10.52 and 10.53. No such problem with 10.10.

Maybe it's a plugin that causes this excessive memory usage. My flash plugin (after upgrading to 10.53 the problem disappeared but now it eats lots of CPU power) was somehow broken. Even when I had only one single tab opened with a flash video playing in it, Opera took more than 1GB memory. So, guys, you better check if the problem doesn't occur when Opera uses one or more plugins in particular.

As stated above, I already did that check - can save 30-40 MB disabling plug-ins, but not more

Originally posted by Hibou57:

Opera 10.53 is there, try it, this may be better

technically it cannot be better because the only change was the security bug fix. no performance improvement was made in 10.53

Originally posted by DieuBaZin:

As stated above, I already did that check - can save 30-40 MB disabling plug-ins, but not more

Not an easy way, however, to get informations about what's going on, using Microsoft's Process Explorer, you may see something unexpected perhaps, which may help to understand.

Are you enough at ease with this kind of tools to have a try with this one ?

Note : this does not solve anything, this is just diagnosis tool.

If you ever have a look at it, could you, please, post a screen-shot of what you see ?

Opera is just taking as much as it's needed and available. If you have 1GB it'll suck 200-300MB, but if you have 6GB it may take 2.5GB if there's enough free RAM. And that's good!

I wonder why do you need RAM if you don't use it?

That's not the point of this thread - but I agree that Opera should use a reasonable amount of RAM Up to 10.10 that was the case, but 10.5* can, under some as yet unknown conditions, take all of the RAM. This results in all other apps., processes etc. using the Page File and the computer slows right down - this is not reasonable.

In the past I've often defended Opera's use of RAM, but the current behaviour is unreasonable.

Originally posted by e-berlin:

If you have 1GB it'll suck 200-300MB, but if you have 6GB it may take 2.5GB if there's enough free RAM. And that's good!

I heard this explanation a lot & it make sense if Opera actually behave as described...
But Opera 10.5x doesn't let go of the RAM when other application need 'em. Not only that, VM hold by Opera keep bubble up & won't released any of 'em, which causing my PC grind to a halt every hour if I do not restart Opera once awhile. This is the same symptom I experienced years ago from Firefox 2, my guess is it's probably a memory leak problem.

By the way, I noticed this memory problem since 9.5x but it's not really serious back then, Opera only gobble up a ton of RAM but it will take hours before it slowdown my PC, & it took a few minutes to shutdown Opera (released all memory use by Opera). But since 10.5x, this memory management problem have become very noticeable & unbearable. I hope Opera developers are tackling this problem right now & fixed it ASAP...

Originally posted by dude09:

If you have 1GB it'll suck 200-300MB, but if you have 6GB it may take 2.5GB if there's enough free RAM. And that's good!

That seems to be a fanboy opinion more than anything else. If that's the right way to look at it, why doen't Opera (the company) come out say it.

Opera used to proudly advertise it's thrifty memory usage is past, but now there is no talk about it. Ever wonder why?

Originally posted by rushad0:

Originally posted by dude09:

If you have 1GB it'll suck 200-300MB, but if you have 6GB it may take 2.5GB if there's enough free RAM. And that's good!

That seems to be a fanboy opinion more than anything else. If that's the right way to look at it, why doen't Opera (the company) come out say it.

Opera used to proudly advertise it's thrifty memory usage is past, but now there is no talk about it. Ever wonder why?

Every modern-day browser does the same thing, it's not Opera's patent. When you have enough resources, Opera 10 uses them and gets even faster because pre-caches in RAM and it's always ready. If you only have 512 RAM on a PC built in 1999 don't be a cry baby complaining that latest 2010 browser takes a lot of memory and go for Opera 5 or something.

Previously the design criteria for Opera browsers was to make it work on almost all computers and to use very little resources.

Because technology has significantly enhanced since and became more affordable the design criteria has changed from version 10. It is now important to make Opera fast, e.g. vector graphics, better indexing and just in time compiling of Javascript.

But although it keeps more memory to enhance the performance, the memory is released when other programs need it. To see it first hand, load a few pages, browse around and look at the memory in task manager. Now minimize Opera and see the unused memory instantly being released.

As Opera Linux is further developed, I start feeling the large memory use.

512 RAM on a PC built in 1999

Your computers must be very expensive. I had my 1st hand computer with 128 MB RAM only at that time. 512MB RAM laptop was bought in 2006.

Originally posted by oke:

But although it keeps more memory to enhance the performance, the memory is released when other programs need it. To see it first hand, load a few pages, browse around and look at the memory in task manager. Now minimize Opera and see the unused memory instantly being released.

Yes, it released the physical RAM but not the Virtual Memory (VM), but then the RAM usage will start to climb back up again even when Opera is remain minimized & not active. Try browse with Opera 10.5x for a while to build up the VM & then shutdown the browser. Look at the memory in task manager, Opera is struggling to released 'em.

The VM keep building up overtime & can't be released is the main problem (memory fragmentation???), we are not talking about just the excessive physical RAM usage when Opera is active. Sometimes the VM will keep rising nonstop when visiting some websites, or for whatever reason it just happened randomly - even with userscript & plugins disabled. If you wanna blame the poorly coded websites, I have to disagree because Opera 10.10 can run with those pages just fine.

Originally posted by rushad0:

That seems to be a fanboy opinion more than anything else. If that's the right way to look at it, why doen't Opera (the company) come out say it.

They have said it before, many times, and long before most computers had 2 Gbytes of RAM or more.
From 2003

Originally posted by haavard:

The question has actually been addressed already. The more memory is available, the more Opera will use. This is intentional and the desirable behaviour. After all, the purpose of RAM is to increase performance, so Opera makes use of more RAM for better performance. 40 MB on a 512 MB system is nothing to worry about.

my opinion on opera ram usage is positive.

I currently have about 250'ish tabs loaded in my opera.

reports 542meg used and was just under a gig prior to updating to 10.53 so with high uptime it grew to a gig. Seems high?

Well if I were to load 250 tabs in IE, assuming the system doesnt crash as it would be likely I would expect ram usage to be way higher than a gig, right now I have about 40 tabs used in a few IE windows and IE is using about 1.6gig of ram. Extremely high compared to opera.

On top of this opera actually gives you very good performance for the ram usage, if I use the back/forward in opera it is completely out of ram instant, no other browser does this.

My browser just auto-magically upgraded itself, so not sure how I am supposed to stay with older versions. That said, I tried reducing my memory cache to 100, but it was still taking up a good 150 and 200 of virtual memory. When I closed, it took opera a good couple mins to actually shut down the process... some sort of garbage cleanup routine I guess which seems kind of pointless.

So I bumped the cache value up to 400 to see what happens, thinking maybe virtual memory use is my problem. Same 6 tabs open, and its taking 114 of ram, and 119 of virtual memory. Thought maybe it was the fault of Windows XP, so I set the process priority to Real Time, but nothing seems to have changed.

Well actually, switching back to Opera with other crap going on seems to be a lot faster, not getting as much lag (once I disabled the slippy "Smooth Scrolling" option that made me think my computer was broken). So ya, thanks for forcing an upgrade right in the middle of my testing. Now I have no idea what has made things better.

Originally posted by DarthWilfre:

When I closed, it took opera a good couple mins to actually shut down the process... some sort of garbage cleanup routine I guess which seems kind of pointless.

Exact! Seems also a backup routine but time consuming. I once came to take 1min to close this process.

Originally posted by DarthWilfre:

My browser just auto-magically upgraded itself, so not sure how I am supposed to stay with older versions.

Maybe this helps? Opera forcing automatic updates ON (in update dialog)

Originally posted by DarthWilfre:

When I closed, it took opera a good couple mins to actually shut down the process... some sort of garbage cleanup routine I guess which seems kind of pointless.

Originally posted by robsonpc:

Seems also a backup routine but time consuming. I once came to take 1min to close this process.

AFAIR, Opera has NEVER respected the cache size setting WHILE running...

Hi Hibou!


First of all, thanks for your assistance!

>Not an easy way, however, to get informations about what's going on, using Microsoft's Process Explorer, you may see
>something unexpected perhaps, which may help to understand.

I use process explorer as a task manager replacement, but not sure what you want to see with it?
I never noticed anything unusual, like high fluctuations, or unexpectedly high CPU usage etc.

>The question has actually been addressed already. The more memory is available, the more Opera will use. This is intentional and the desirable >behaviour. After all, the purpose of RAM is to increase performance, so Opera makes use of more RAM for better performance. 40 MB on a 512 MB >system is nothing to worry about.

It would be great if it worked, but I can't confirm that it does - opera uses *more* memory on my 1GB laptop than on my 2GB desktop. I've repeated the test many times, with all the 10.5x released versions, clean install every time, same plug-ins installed, no tweaking of the default settings. On the laptop (both systems run XPSP3 with the latest updates), memory usage is, as already reported, above 500MB about 70-80% of the time. On the desktop, it rarely, if ever, goes over 350-400MB. You'll tell me that 100MB is not so much, but when it's 10% of your installed RAM, it is.
Therefore, I do re-iterate that in view of my experience, opera's memory management and usage is not what I consider good.

Cheers

On Win 7 Ultimate x64: Opera 10.53 --> Opera Memory 1 TAB, 2hour running
and, minimizing Opera not releasing the RAM.
It's Normal ? I think no.
I'm an Opera Huge Fan, since 6.x, but this...
in my personal computer it's not a problem, i have a lot of ram, but, in my work computer, with an Athlon 3000 and 1GB of RAM... if Opera can't relly on that, i'll forced to migrate my Primary browser tho another, maybe Chrome or FF..

I Hope it shoud be Optimized, i can't see the "need" of 500MB to render the page thats open in this case.
Some times, opera is using about 700M (i have 1GB in that machine.. and my company, of couse, not will consider raising that amout of RAM to attend a Browser necessity.

Originally posted by e-berlin:

Originally posted by rushad0:

Originally posted by dude09:

If you have 1GB it'll suck 200-300MB, but if you have 6GB it may take 2.5GB if there's enough free RAM. And that's good!

That seems to be a fanboy opinion more than anything else. If that's the right way to look at it, why doen't Opera (the company) come out say it.
Opera used to proudly advertise it's thrifty memory usage is past, but now there is no talk about it. Ever wonder why?

Every modern-day browser does the same thing, it's not Opera's patent. When you have enough resources, Opera 10 uses them and gets even faster because pre-caches in RAM and it's always ready. If you only have 512 RAM on a PC built in 1999 don't be a cry baby complaining that latest 2010 browser takes a lot of memory and go for Opera 5 or something.

It is fanboy nonsense. Even fanboys don't read threads before posting. If they did they would actually see a LOT of users, right here, that are reporting ACTUAL figures with excessive memory problems and system performance hits, including users with ultra-modern systems. I guess its better to stick one's head in the sand (it is the fanboy code after all) - but it really doesn't help when trying to sound cleverer than everyone else.

Garbage collection whilst running vs on shutdown?

Firefox appears to do it whilst running, the result is I see jerky scrolling, jerky flahs videos youtube etc. and a generally unresponsive app as whatever it is doing in the background causes lag.

Opera may take a while to shutdown but I dont get any of the firefox issues whilst it is running and I assume this is because opera decide to do the GC crap on shutdown when responsiveness is not important instead of whilst you using the app.

Originally posted by aceChipping:

It is fanboy nonsense.

Well, look at this:

Originally posted by Pesala:

From 2003

Haavard isn't a fanboy, he works in Opera Software.

Originally posted by robsonpc:

Originally posted by DarthWilfre:

When I closed, it took opera a good couple mins to actually shut down the process... some sort of garbage cleanup routine I guess which seems kind of pointless.

Exact! Seems also a backup routine but time consuming. I once came to take 1min to close this process.

It's removing things from the swap / pagefile and saving cache correctly, writing EOFs to the HD, etc. It isn't pointless.

disable plugins globaly and restart opera and enable on sites that need it.

How much RAM should Opera eat?
Here is my snapshot, but i don't know whether it's normal or too much. Personally I didn't experience any issue regarding the performance of my system.

Originally posted by rafaelluik:

Originally posted by aceChipping:

It is fanboy nonsense.

Well, look at this:

Originally posted by Pesala:

From 2003

Haavard isn't a fanboy, he works in Opera Software.

The statements made were nonsense because they were ignoring the real problems that people here had posted, and they were inappropriately quoting Haavard's statement (as you are). No-one was saying Opera should not use more RAM. They are not complaining about it using '200-300MB out of 1GB', they are saying its using 700MB out of 1GB, and not releasing it easily. They are trying to find out if this is designed behaviour, if its a problem, if there is something they can do to change it, or to just let Opera know.

Originally posted by aceChipping:

The statements made were nonsense because they were ignoring the real problems that people here had posted, and they were inappropriately quoting Haavard's statement (as you are). No-one was saying Opera should not use more RAM. They are not complaining about it using '200-300MB out of 1GB', they are saying its using 700MB out of 1GB, and not releasing it easily. They are trying to find out if this is designed behaviour, if its a problem, if there is something they can do to change it, or to just let Opera know.

i couldn't have said it any better. thanks.

and just for the records, Opera is a beautiful piece of software with some obvious improvements needed.

Ok, maybe Haavard statement is a little outdated.

>It's removing things from the swap / pagefile and saving cache correctly, writing EOFs to the HD, etc. It isn't pointless.

(a bit off-topic)
You are right that it isn't pointless at all; but ONE minute?!
(and with HD cache disabled?!)

Was just looking for something in 10.53, had opened and closed several tabs and sites and RAM was around 300MB (out of 1GB), so no problem.

Clicked on a link to look at a likely site, Opera became sluggish and 'stopped' - I then noticed that the RAM was 1MB left!.

It was a site that has many pictures (of vacuum cleaners - not exciting!):

http://www.shop-com.co.uk/Home+Store-Brand-Nilfisk-24

No trouble at all in Opera 10.10 or FF but takes all of the RAM within a few seconds in 10.53.

Originally posted by GiraffePC:

Clicked on a link to look at a likely site, Opera became sluggish and 'stopped' - I then noticed that the RAM was 1MB left!.
It was a site that has many pictures (of vacuum cleaners - not exciting!):
http://www.shop-com.co.uk/Home+Store-Brand-Nilfisk-24

I couldn't reproduce this, maybe it was an ad that wasn't there when I visited or simply a case of some kind of memory leak, which is rare. (Win7)

I have to add that generally I love Opera 10.5. Opera have done a great job with it, especially the site compatibility (and the browser.js updates). I had quite a lot of problems with sites in 10.10 and before; the later versions have improved the situation greatly, and it is definitely quicker (on powerful systems) and looks better.

Originally posted by GiraffePC:

It was a site that has many pictures (of vacuum cleaners - not exciting!):
http://www.shop-com.co.uk/Home+Store-Brand-Nilfisk-24

Confirmed. Another few more sites are Gametrailers.com & Kotaku.com, if you disabled content block & opened a few pages from those sites, Opera's VM will go skyrocket for no reason... Please don't blame flash or plug-ins, because I have 'em disabled.

How does this - Clipboard02.png - make any sense?

I was downloading a bunch of stuff for the sims - small zips and rars, that is, andf browsing a couple of forums and journals that were closed before noticing that jump. I was okay, even if peeved, with the 300-400MB it took up out of my 2GB RAM, but this is just ridiculous. I'm usually not just browsing the internet! I may have a resource heavy game launched, a messenger open, several docs, etc, it can't be that a single program hogs so much memory that my computer freezes for several painful seconds each time I switch the program!

I think people complaining about complainers are not only hypocrites but have either short term or selective memory. I've always sang Opera's praises to people using Firefox showing how their browser was consuming massive amounts of resources yet it wasn't as feature rich. Many made the move but now it seems as if Opera has lost sight of what set it apart. In the 10.10 builds memory consumption was resonable but with the 10.50 builds I see a huge increase in memory without feeling the improvements that are claimed to be coming with that.

Case in point:
opening Opera to speeddail - 10.10=33mb -10.5x=68mb
1 page - 10.10=50mb - 10.5x=92mb
3 pages - 10.10=130mb - 10.5x=280mb

I am not seeing the performance improvements claimed to warrant this increase and that makes me believe that it is not a feature but a leak. More proof of this is that when using full screen mode with toolbars, minimizing Opera does not release any memory at all yet it does when minimizing from normal mode. That is not a feature it is a problem and one that is a direct result of the whole ballot box fiasco where Opera has tried to attract new users but lost sight of what attracted the old ones.

Originally posted by blaxima:

minimizing Opera does not release any memory at all

agreed.

Opera Dev Team REALLY must improve memory management!

I'm glad I thought to check out the Opera forums for this new issue with OPera.
It started with the update before 10.53, but after 10.53 it seems to be worse.

CPU usage jumps and stays to the 35-60% range with sometimes as few as three tabs open. Upon opening 6-7 tabs, memory jumps to 450,000+ K of memory.

Viewing the Yahoo pictures of the Gulf oil spill froze Opera totally. Totally unacceptable for a browser, it's not like 20 tabs were open at the time, likely only 3 or 4.
Opera also doesn't close when you "X" it out either. Sometimes takes several minutes to close.

Sure, you can close and reopen, but it's totally a pain, and with it not shutting down immediately, its grounds to look elsewhere for a good browser.

I remember when FireFox had this issues many updates ago. Made internet usage almost impossible, and granted it was worse than Opera now is.
It's what made me come to Opera in the first place.
Well, FireFox has dealt with this horrendous bloat.
I'd sure hate to see Opera go the way of huge bloat.

FTR, I have 3 gigs of memory and use Windows Vista Home.

Hi .

I opened 12 tabs in Opera 10.53
P.s. All of them is Opera forums.
---
Opera eats:
CPU: 02
Memory: 250.000k
and IE 8 eats only 225.000k
---
Memory usage are high, need fix

That sort of usage isn't too bad - Opera was good with RAM, as I found out when I had to run on half the normal amount. Opera just took less.
Firefox might take less, but navigation with the mouse is sluggish when compared with Opera.

The real problem is that some pages cause 10.5x to take all of the RAM and closing the tab or Opera is the only way out.

Originally posted by GiraffePC:

The real problem is that some pages cause 10.5x to take all of the RAM and closing the tab or Opera is the only way out.

well said, i don't mind high memory usage. but then you close the tabs, memory must be freed.

Originally posted by rushad0:

well said, i don't mind high memory usage. but then you close the tabs, memory must be freed.

Why? I would like it to free memory:
- after cleaning the recently closed tabs (IMHO quickly reopening recently closed tab is more important than memory consumption)
- after a relative amount of time after tab was closed and moved to trash (depending on the size of trash and length of the session)
- when other application claim to need memory

But I agree that 10.5x uses way to much memory in configuration similar to 10.1x (turned off history search and cache) so fixing that would be nice (:

>IMHO quickly reopening recently closed tab is more important than memory consumption

Not when you are stuck with 1 GB of RAM!
The core of the problem is not so much that it is annoying (yet god knows it is), it is that people have to *upgrade* their machines or are even stuck just to run a web browser........
I mean, we are not talking about the latest game here, we are talking about a *web browser*.... I've posted figures with ALL plug-ins disabled, and they are much too hgih for someone whose laptop accpets only 1 GB of RAM, like mine.

Indeed, RAM should be freed as soon as the tab is closed. I DON'T mean clearing the cache - I mean freeing the memory used to render the page. Even on an old machine it's unlikely you'll be annoyed by the time needed by Opera to re-render the page. Cache size, unless set to auto, is fixed (20 MB in my case), so this memory is reserved and should never grow -if it does, it is a bug.
cheers

Originally posted by lwiczek:

Originally posted by rushad0:

well said, i don't mind high memory usage. but then you close the tabs, memory must be freed.

Why? I would like it to free memory:
- after cleaning the recently closed tabs (IMHO quickly reopening recently closed tab is more important than memory consumption)
- after a relative amount of time after tab was closed and moved to trash (depending on the size of trash and length of the session)
- when other application claim to need memory

But I agree that 10.5x uses way to much memory in configuration similar to 10.1x (turned off history search and cache) so fixing that would be nice (:

It can be difficult to close the tab that is taking all of the RAM - closing an app. is easier as there are other ways of doing so.
When the RAM is freed, almost everything is written to disk; this results in a lot of RAM freed (about 600MB on my PC) and everything running very slowly. Even turning off takes 2 - 3 times as long as usual.

RAM usage seems to have improved in 10.54 builds (not very significant), but still closing tabs does not release memory.

Same here in 10.53 build 3374:

This is when having 7 tabs open, none of which containing huge, heavy, extreme, or plugin-infested pages

Originally posted by TheJuggalo:

This is when having 7 tabs open, none of which containing huge, heavy, extreme, or plugin-infested pages

oooffff.... that's rough!!!

Seem to have found the cause of all of the RAM being taken, thanks to a suggestion from EricJH via a topic re. Opera in Comodo's forums.

The UserJS YoutubeProtectionRemover.js is the culprit - with that disabled the problem has gone

I have usually more than 500M and no userjs at all
considering the number of reports and different usages and situations discussed in this thread, intuitively I'd say the problem lies in opera's core, not (only) the plug-ins.
cheers

I used this script only two days and memory always remained high. Is not the fault of userjs.

Phew!!!..my post has generated lots of replies.....i had completely forgotten about it after posting....anyway so i did get my answer that is a "general" issue. However, i must mention the following annoyances with opera and i wonder if they are related to this memory issue:

1. When i am typing this message, there is a lag in what I am typing and what is appearing on screen.
2. Whenever i load up flash content the memory leak goes way up higher...its 250 MB at the moment with four tabs open...and i just loaded a flash website....and it went up to 300 MB.
3. Flash games and other flash content is generally very laggy in Opera.

Here is what I should recommend Opera should do:

1. Come up with a lite version of Opera...without the mail, torrent, widgets etc.
2. Incorporate the ability to choose what features you want, for example some people dont need the torrent client but its still there running in the background!

Although I should mention that I have a 7 years old IDE hard disk and three mail accounts in Opera at the moment. Maybe thats the reason why its a bit laggy on my system. Any ideas?

Robbie

Opera 10.53
Windows 7 Home Premium
Intel Dual Core 1.83 Ghz
with 40 GB Seagate IDE HD
2 GB RAM

Well, I decided to contribute to this thread. As mentioned by some my problem is with virtual memory which inflates and isn't released. The image below is an example.

mem.jpg

More than 1G in virtual memory but only 100M in memory (process working set). As I'm writing this I have 250M and not 100M in memory but virtual memory is about the same at more than 1G.

I'm in windows xp sp3 and basically an afternoon of browsing suffices to inflate virtual memory to above 1G. Sooner or later the system says it lacks virtual memory and will try to allocate more which is a problem. Usually once I notice that virtual memory is above 1G I close opera which takes minutes to release all the virtual minute.

Originally posted by rnathbatra:

Here is what I should recommend Opera should do:

1. Come up with a lite version of Opera...without the mail, torrent, widgets etc.
2. Incorporate the ability to choose what features you want, for example some people dont need the torrent client but its still there running in the background!

Man, you're 100% right, that's my oppinion also. Let's hope someone from Opera's dev team actually reads this forum.

LOL, Opera Lite isn't going to happen, they don't have time and money to do that...

Originally posted by fefrie:

Isn't it good that Opera uses a lot of ram? The less pagefiling that happens the better right? Less read/writes to the hard drive the better I would assume

You sound like a sock puppet trying to excuse poor programming.

I downloaded Opera 10.53 and tried to use it for two weeks, but Opera 10 is a pig. It eats excessive amounts of RAM, manages it poorly and runs too damned slow. And let's not forget the one or two daily crashes, as well. I switched back to 9.64 and now my laptop works just fine, running faster and using less than half as much RAM for the same same number of sites and tabs.

Opera have really screwed the pooch on this one. I'm starting to think it would be better to switch to K-Meleon full time, not just as my portable browser. With the same pages and tabs, K-Meleon uses 40% of the RAM that Opera 9.64 uses.

I'd rather have speed and reliability than "features" (i.e. the Microshaft slogan, "It's not a bug, it's a feature!").

http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/

Originally posted by soldier1st:

disable plugins globaly and restart opera and enable on sites that need it.

How many websites have you ever visited? Four? If that is how many, your "suggestion" would make sense. Otherwise, expecting people to change settings for a dozens or scores of sites is ludicrous.

What you blathered is not a solution. It is dumping Opera's failure onto the users.

Opera uses 0.0 CPU according to activity monitor on my Apple G4 laptop, about the same as Safari
GLu