Hello everyone,
I've been using both Windows (for work) and Linux Mint (for personal use) lately, and I've noticed a significant difference in memory usage when running vivaldi (synced tabs and extensions).
On Windows, opening a typical number of tabs and extensions chews up around 2 GB of RAM.
However, on Linux Mint, the exact same setup only uses about 600 MB of RAM!
I'm really curious about the technical reasons behind this huge gap.
You can't compare task manager and whatever process manager / top command you use in Linux 1:1 They report memory use differently.
You could compare like for like by opening Vivaldi's task manager on both (shift + esc)
Simple answer, there is less overhead and dependencies on Linux than Window. Can think of Window as literal preloaded generalist jack of trade and Linux as something you can train and specialize it. As Linux is literally just a kernel, while Window is a whole operating system (OS). As ram gap is mainly an accounting/attribution difference plus OS driver and hook overhead, not just raw browser efficiency. When you normalize measurement and match GPU/sandbox behavior, the gap usually narrows significantly.
But this isn't a full answer, (as this is a very simplified) as there are things like aggressive shared DLLs, etc.
Also personal note opinion, it doesn't help when the code is probably spaghetti, so unless they can magically clean up the code. It would probably still be crap
ðey could use AI to clean the code ðey seem to already be getting some good results from that :)
Such as task manager not closing itself?
There’s way too many variables to make a direct 1:1 comparison here simple, including the fact that memory management works vastly differently on windows and Linux and the way it gets measured and reported can differ as well.
The real answer is probably that the difference isn’t nearly as pronounced as you might be thinking it is.