Nathan Roach

Nathan Roach

Nathan Roach  //  An attorney and technologist, Mr. Roach maintains an active intellectual property law and litigation practice focused on helping inventors, innovators, and startups avoid trouble, protect their IP, and stay focused on transforming their field of endeavor.

As a former programmer and active entrepreneur, Mr. Roach also seeks to build new solutions to today's problems. Some past tech highlights include:

1999: Employee #19 @ Rackspace.com
2002: Co-Founder of Litigation Dynamics Inc.
2007: Involved with the Supreme Court of Texas Webcasting Project and the St. Mary's Technology Courtroom Project
2008/9: Guest lecturer, St. Mary's University Advanced Trial Advocacy course.

 
Mar 1 / 5:01pm

I'm tough on web browsers ...

This is sort of an aside from my usual content, but I thought it was worth sharing because I firmly believe that the web browser is going to take up an increasing share of our computing tasks over the next few years.  

I ask a lot from my computers, and I'm particularly tough on web browsers.  As you can see from the screenshot, my Safari web browser is taking up 1.01 Gigabytes of memory.  And, it has almost 2 gigs of virtual memory allocated.  It's also using over 100% of my CPU, which is possible in this case because I have more than one processor core.  As you can see, it's all browser utilization, as Flash (oft demonized by Apple) is only using 6% CPU and about 80 megs of RAM.  In Safari's defense, I have just shy of 100 tabs open at this point, many running javascript-heavy sites.  

I need to try out Chrome and Firefox with these kind of loads and see if they fare better.  

Screen_shot_2010-03-01_at_4

update: I downloaded the latest version of Chrome for Mac, and made it my default browser for a day.  The result is that after transferring all my open tabs from Safari (which was using 768M at the time), Chrome is only using 99.8M of resident memory for the same number of tabs.  Even Firefox is using more than that, and it only has three tabs open at the moment. 

I'll probably continue to use Firefox as my "work" browser, because it renders the legal research websites that I use with greater fidelity than the webkit based browsers.  But for my personal browsing, I think I'll leave Chrome as the default.  I'm going to miss Safari's thumbnail preview window, which looks nicer and holds more locations than Chrome's equivalent.  But that's a small trade-off for a memory footprint that is much much lower.