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Internet Explorer 8: Over 2x “Fatter” than Firefox

Posted September 2nd, 2008 by Mary Jane

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 arrived last week amid great expectations and some heated controversy. The latter was due to Microsoft’s decision to adopt a standards-compliant rendering model that breaks a great many IE-specific web sites.

However, while various bloggers and pundits waxed breathlessly about all of the new bells and whistles (including the much-reported “porn mode”), we were busy putting Microsoft’s new browser under the microscope of the exo.repository.

Note: For more information on the exo.performance.network, or to register for your free Analysis Portal account, visit www.xpnet.com.

Over the course of several days, we evaluated IE 8 under both Windows XP (SP3) and Vista x86 (SP1) to determine how this major update behaves and what, if any, new burdens it might place on today’s over-taxed (in the case of Vista) Windows PCs.

What we found was another example of unchecked Microsoft  code “bloat,” complete with “shirt-bursting, waistline-stretching” memory consumption and the kind of CPU-hogging thread growth normally reserved for massively parallel server farms.

For example, on our Dell OptiPlex 745 (Core 2 Duo @ 2.66GHz) Vista/XP test bed with 2GB of RAM, IE 8 consumed just under 380MB of memory during a 10-site, multi-tab browsing scenario of popular general media, technical media and humor-related Web destinations (see bottom of this article for a list of sites).

By contrast, IE 7 consumed just under 250MB rendering this same workload, while Firefox 3.01 put both IE versions to shame by completing the same browsing scenario in just 159MB of RAM.

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Figure 1 – Peak Browser Working Set Under XP/Vista

The story gets worse for IE 8 when you examine the number of threads spawned to complete the scenarios. Under Firefox, the count never exceed 29 concurrent threads. IE 7 spawned a hefty 65 execution threads, while IE 8 tried to choke the life out of the CPU with a massive 171 concurrent threads.

By comparison, the instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 x64 Edition that hosts the exo.repository rarely spins more than 100 concurrent threads – this on an 8-way, 8GB server machine servicing over 3000 actively monitored PCs.

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Figure 2 – Peak Browser Thread Count Under XP/Vista

One area where IE 8 came out ahead of Firefox is in overall CPU utilization. Firefox consumed an average 33% Processor Time under XP (48% under Vista), while IE 8 took-up 22% of the CPU (33% under Vista) and IE 7 was the least aggressive at 13% (24% under Vista).

Considering how much faster Firefox is than IE 7/8 at displaying most web sites, the additional CPU cycles are understandable and likely attributable to a more efficient rendering engine employing fewer threads in exchange for faster linear performance.

Some observations:

  • With a massive working set approaching 20% of our test bed’s 2GB RAM configuration, IE 8 may be the long awaited “killer app” that drives customers towards 4GB+ systems and the 64-bit flavors of Windows Vista/7.
  • By greatly increasing the number of concurrent execution threads, and then spreading them out across multiple, discrete processes (in our case, 6 separate instances of iexplore.exe), Microsoft seems to be positioning IE 8 to take advantage of the greatly expanded core counts of future Intel and AMD CPUs – at the cost of overwhelming today’s single and dual-core PCs.
  • By delivering superior performance while maintaining a nearly 2x smaller memory and CPU footprint across the board, Firefox 3.01 proves once again that the open source community can often trump even the most well-funded commercial projects when it comes to delivering efficient, streamlined code.

Bottom Line: No matter how you slice the data, IE 8 represents a massive expansion of the baseline runtime requirements for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. Meanwhile, the Firefox folks continue to embarrass Microsoft by “doing it better” (including delivering superior performance and overall standards compliance) while consuming fewer hardware resources. How these efficiencies will play in the aforementioned multi-core future remains to be seen.

It may be that Microsoft’s focus on parallelism will reap dividends once the hardware catches up with the software - much like Vista has looked better as the Windows PC ecosystem has evolved to support its epically porcine girth. Such massively-threaded products will likely feel more at home on the 4, 8 and 16-core systems of tomorrow, but for right now they represent the worst kind of code bloat.

List of web sites visited as part of our test scenario:

Note: To ensure an accurate, rich-media experience, we installed both the Adobe Flash 9 and Microsoft SilverLight 2.0 (Beta) plug-ins under each tested browser/OS combination.

Source: exo.blog

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