To 64 or not to 64?
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Well, that was certainly fun:
http://peacekeeper.futuremark.com/results?key=AfgL&resultId=5914692
The top result - Chrome 40 - is actually the 64 bit Vivaldi. Opera 12 holds its own, although the result makes no hint that the html5 video poster image failed to animate. That said, Opera 12 outperformed them all on the large ripple test. Not bad for an obsolete, niche rendering engine!
Anyway, it's a little off topic from my original concern. Rather late in the discussion, I decided to see what Wikipedia had to say and, as far as I can tell:
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- 32 bit stuff runs in emulated mode on modern Windows installations
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- creating 32 bit programs is sometimes easier because they are still (slightly) better supported by libraries and drivers
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- 64 bit memory addressing not only allows for more memory, but can also improve the way that memory is managed (hence the possible speed advantages
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- there is some motivation to create 32 bit programs in order not to limit your user base to the most recent platforms
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- there is some motivation to create 32 bit programs in order not to limit your user base to the most recent platforms
I think I'll stick with trialing Vivaldi 64-bit, as a sort of "vote" for that version. To be honest, if I'm running a Raspberry PI, or an old XP netbook, or some other "specialist" or "resource limited" kit, then I want a browser dedicated to the limitations of those platforms. With Vivaldi, I'm looking for a power-user's browser to run on a modern PC. As far as I'm concerned, they can ignore obsolete architectures!
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Then again, while it's certainly true that 64bit apps can technically access more memory, it's really a non-issue with Chromium-based browsers as they spawn a new process for each opened tab, therefore allowing every single tab access to the full 4GB of memory even on 32bit systems (so it's gonna be a while before we run into a memory limit with them), and then there's also the fact that while 64bit browsers allow the use of more memory, they also consume more of it with the same content. In case of Vivaldi, it's about 20-25 % more, according to my experience.
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20-25%?! That must surely be caused by the early stage of development rather than the 64-bitness per se.
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Well, not really. 64bit app is expected to need more memory than its 32bit version. It might not, but it usually does, and it can be quite significant sometimes (and much worse than 20 percent). I'm not a programmer at all, so I can't really explain to you why and how exactly does that happen, and it certainly depends on the given app and data it works with, but one of the reasons is precisely "the 64-bitness" - don't forget that by going from 32bit to 64bit you need to use 8 bytes of memory instead of 4 bytes to store any memory address your app needs to work with at that moment.
And if you look at other browsers, you'll see that their 64bit versions always use more memory than their 32bit versions, it's most certainly not limited to Vivaldi. 20-25 percent is more or less the average value.
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I know from experience that for math intensive programs,,64 bits will be faster than 32 bit. For a pure math program (Floating point double precision) our 32 bit compilers produced executables which ran exactly twice as fast as the previous 16 bit compiler produced. And I would expect 32 vs 64 would be the same.
For normal multipurpose use, I can see no observable difference between the 32 bit win 7 and the 64 bit version, although I haven't accurately benchmarked them. I bet for heavy duty rendering of video and the like 64 bit would be faster. -
I use 64 bits mainly because I can and for the sake of helping them bugtest it, and sure enough it is slightly more buggy than the 32-bit I run on my tablet.
Indeed that's is the only real meaning of using the 64 bit version.
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64 bit code should (in theory) run faster due to being able to support more memory, being able to support larger-sized numbers and having twice as many CPU registers. In practice the differences are a lot more subtle, and in order to understand it you really need to get your head around both how compilers work and the role of libraries in software development.
Let me take libraries. When you write a program the chances are that you will be using a library. The most common example is when you want to display text onscreen. Either your chosen language packages the library you need or you have to manually include it (eg: #include <stdio.h>in C). Very rarely would a developer be writing code themselves that carries out the nuts and bolts of this. At present the state of libraries available is, shall we say, quite variable. Some have been optimised for 64bit support, some have token support and some are still the same 32bit versions. IF (and it's a big if) all libraries of your code were 64bit optimised you would get a speed boost, but such optimisation just isn't here yet.
Another subtlety, which also involve compilers, is the increased number of registers. In theory, with more registers any compiled code (which would include libraries for memory management) would have less data shifting between the registers. The SSE2 instruction set which comes with 64bit CPUs are faster (eg: allowing for some parallel calculations which under 32bit would have to be done in series).
What I have written here is a gross GROSS oversimplification of what is a fairly complex field. Not all the theoretical benefits of 64bit are currently realised due to the presence non-64bit-supporting libraries and a host of other compiler/library oddities. But I hope it gives a little insight.</stdio.h>
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Is unlikely to be a problem of memory limitations. For each open tab is allocated a separate process (feature engine). At present, a 64 bit version of perhaps the aesthetic moment, rather than a useful practical.
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@Al-Khwarizmi:
It's a pain when my Chropera is not responding and making my system lag, I press Ctrl+Alt+Del and I see 80 "opera.exe *32" processes and have no idea which one to kill. I'd rather have a single process as in the old Opera.
using process explorer… it is sometimes possible to tell which of the processes is down/unresponsive - procexp displays different states of the process using different colours
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@Al-Khwarizmi:
It's a pain when my Chropera is not responding and making my system lag, I press Ctrl+Alt+Del and I see 80 "opera.exe *32" processes and have no idea which one to kill. I'd rather have a single process as in the old Opera.
using process explorer… it is sometimes possible to tell which of the processes is down/unresponsive - procexp displays different states of the process using different colours
I hadn't noticed different colors for different states of the same process in Process Explorer (are you sure about that? …is it a new feature? ...or is there a setting that activates the feature?). However, you can definitely monitor CPU and memory usage for each process if you set up Process Explorer to display the relevant columns. Then you can kill the process that is hogging resources. However, AFAIK, you can't know in advance which of your open Chropera tabs/windows that will kill. (I haven't been following Chropera 15+ development closely enough to know if there is a way to determine which tab is associated with which process.)
So I was tickled to discover that vivaldi://memory-redirect provides memory info and process ID (PID) for each Vivaldi process, including the web page title for each process that is a tab. This (combined with CPU usage info from Task Manager or Process Explorer) makes it easy to identify and close the correct tab if one of them is misbehaving, without having to close the whole Vivaldi browser.
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I hadn't noticed different colors for different states of the same process in Process Explorer (are you sure about that? …is it a new feature? ...or is there a setting that activates the feature?). However, you can definitely monitor CPU and memory usage for each process if you set up Process Explorer to display the relevant columns. Then you can kill the process that is hogging resources.
as far as i can remember… i used it several times - even to kill some tabs in opera dev when they froze...
but, it is possible, that i changed some settings somewhere in the procexp - i usually play with settings of apps... but now i really cannot remember what i have or havent done...edit:
okay, now i am not able to reproduce it... i am not really sure how to quickly force an opera tab to hang up...
and looking at the procexp settings, it is possible that i used a technic similar to what you described (with the cpu and memory usage) and not the process highlight colour... not really sure now, and i do not have time currently to find out - perhaps in the evening
thus... sorry, mea culpa -
If you have CPU Usage column, found in Process Performance, it will show as a text saying "Not responding" rather than the CPU usage.
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If you have CPU Usage column, found in Process Performance, it will show as a text saying "Not responding" rather than the CPU usage.
Ahh, thanks! It does vaguely seem like I have seen that once or twice when there was a completely non-responsive process.
But with Chrome, Chropera, etc., I don't usually see a tab/process completely hang (don't such tabs usually just "crash" or crash and restart?). Instead, I usually just see a tab hog excessive resources (CPU and/or memory) and bog down the whole browser or even the whole system. …And it's usually easy enough to spot the process with excessive CPU and/or memory usage in Task Manager or Process Explorer, but not to identify by name the tab associated with the process (unless something similar to vivaldi://memory-redirect has been developed for Chropera; IIRC you can do something similar with Chrome's built-in Task Manager, but I haven't looked at that for a couple years).
okay, now i am not able to reproduce it… i am not really sure how to quickly force an opera tab to hang up...
Thanks for checking.
Yes it would be interesting if there were a reliable method to hang a single tab in Chrome or Opera (or Vivaldi). This Stack Exchange thread seems to be asking exactly the right question, but doesn't seem to offer any good answers.
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To 64!
And it is an information for developers, not for users.
We have 2015 century and most apps still use architecture from previous decade, and We talk here about technology where 2 years could be an era. -
If you have CPU Usage column, found in Process Performance, it will show as a text saying "Not responding" rather than the CPU usage.
Ahh, thanks! It does vaguely seem like I have seen that once or twice when there was a completely non-responsive process.
But with Chrome, Chropera, etc., I don't usually see a tab/process completely hang (don't such tabs usually just "crash" or crash and restart?). Instead, I usually just see a tab hog excessive resources (CPU and/or memory) and bog down the whole browser or even the whole system. …And it's usually easy enough to spot the process with excessive CPU and/or memory usage in Task Manager or Process Explorer, but not to identify by name the tab associated with the process (unless something similar to vivaldi://memory-redirect has been developed for Chropera; IIRC you can do something similar with Chrome's built-in Task Manager, but I haven't looked at that for a couple years).
You asked how to see a Not responding process in procexp, that's a flaw in Chrome implementation of their design. I don't have anything about it
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@RRR13:
Wait, tablet?! What tablet?!
Uhhh Windows ThinkPad tablet maybe?
HP Elite Pad?
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Windows on some full-windows touch devices reads touch the same way it would on a notebook touchpad - you know, faux-mouse input. There's no zoom with multi-touch, or anything like that.
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It's now almost 2017, and I'm wondering if anyone has noticed a change in Vivaldi 64-bit, and whether or not it's worth switching to. I switched back to 32-bit early this year because, as Ayespy mentioned, it was a teeny bit faster. Are things any different now in Vivaldi 64-bit? Anything expected to change?
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If Google claimed increased speed, security, and stability 2.5 years ago, then one has to wonder how the same can't be true of Vivaldi and other 64-bit browsers built on the same foundation.
I don't think speed is a big deal, since either way it's not going to be something that humans can notice, but the other two factors are.
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@rseiler My bigger concern right now is whether or not Vivaldi 64-bit will take up a dramatically larger amount of RAM while being slightly slower. When I used it earlier this year, I did see higher RAM usage and it was a bit slower, so I'm wondering if that's not the case anymore.
I have 6GB of RAM by the way.