Vivaldi performance - lack of RAM

xtech

Hello, i would like to use Vivaldi as the prime browser, but there is little hitch. I use three web browsers incl. Firefox. Usually i have opened two of them at once. My laptop is not the newest one, i have 32-bit W7, 4GB (in real 3GB) of RAM. Until the moment i tried the Vivaldi, my avarage usage of RAM was 2,20-2,50 GB RAM. But when i have opened Firefox together with finished Vivaldi (incl. all extensions), the RAM goes to the absolute peak and i get in a minute Windows warning pop-up windows about lack acute of performance (i have never see it on my laptop!).

In Vivaldi i use same extensions as in my Firefox. BUT the combination of Vivaldi and Firefox running at once seems to be non-functional - because of the Vivaldi. Vivaldi obviously takes more RAM and disabling my laptop, so i need to close Vivaldi. I also had to restart my laptop once..

Well, this is a problem - i hoped that Vivaldi is lightweighted, RAM friendly and older computer friendly! But it seems it is not, and on the contrary it is heavy RAM consuming.

Is there any solution? Will Vivaldi team work on it, please?

Ayespy

@xtech Nothing full of extensions will be light weight. I use Vivaldi by itself, not with another browser, on a rig essentially identical to yours, 15 years old, with the exception that mine also has the (in testing only) M3 email client integrated into it. I do not run out of RAM unless I run several other programs at the same time. Of course I upgraded it to Win10, so it manages resources better than Win7.

I also run that same version of Vivaldi on a 17-year-old 32-bit Win7 desktop tower that is maxed out at 2GB of RAM. (of course being ancient like that, it's slow as molasses in winter) That rig also does not run out of RAM - but again, I don't run a lot of apps side-by side.

But all Chromium-based browsers are memory-hungry, especially with a bunch of extensions. Vivaldi team cannot make the Chromium engine efficient. I don't use extensions for that reason and for security reasons. Therefore, I am able to run Vivaldi on my rig, problem-free. Unfortunately, of you are going to use a Chromium-based browser with several extensions, plus another browser at the same time, you are just going to have to upgrade your hardware.

I WILL say this - Google has managed to make Chromium 81 more efficient than Chromium 80. My internal test version uses less resources than Stable or Snapshot Vivaldi. So perhaps there is that to look forward to.

mib2berlin

@xtech
Hi, you can check Vivaldi task manager in tools menu or Shift + Esc which extension or panel use most RAM and disable it if not needed.
I stop using adblocker as latest snapshot has one inbuild, for example.
Iirc there was some tricks to get the leaving 1 GB to work on Windows, may a search could help.

Cheers, mib

xtech

Hi, thanks for the tip with Shift+Esc. I did not know about this tool;) It sound awesome, now i will be able to examine how much Vivaldi and each tab and add-on is CPU/RAM consuming.

Anyway, i made some little investigation on this and i found that using Vivaldi together with Firefox it is problematic. It is known that Firefox is pretty RAM hungry. But Vivaldi takes almost same portion of RAM.
The Vivaldi / Brave mixture sounds much better because Brave is really RAM friendly. So in this scenario i do not get any RAM limit warnings.

To examine RAM on later Windows OS (i use W7), it is kind of problematic. In normal state my RAM usage is higher in default, but after i run some RAM hungry programme and close it, the default RAM is "compressed" on 0,8 GB.

Anyway, how in practice: In default state the RAM value on my computer was 0,8 GB from overall 4 GB RAM capacity (in real approx. 3 GB RAM). Then i started Vivaldi and the RAM stepped up on 1,50 GB. The same process with Firefox was 2,20 GB. The same process with Brave was 1,40 GB.

I have to note, that i have same add-ons installed on Vivaldi, Brave and Firefox. In Firefox i have much more tabs, so i do not know if this could be the reason of such massive RAM usage, but as stated above, Firefox is pretty cumborsome in this RAM matter. Both Vivaldi and Brave have just few open tabs.

I also found that Vivaldi is during opening process much friendly to the RAM peaks. Vivaldi do not touch the RAM peak, there is just little overhead. Brave getting higher for short time and get down on normal RAM value. Firefox goes up both in RAM and CPU (touching the peaks) and and it takes a bit longer time to go down on normal RAM/CPU value.

So it seems that it is not Vivaldi who is responsible for strange pop-up windows about lack of RAM. So i am sorry for blaming Vivaldi for this;)

And about performance and add-ons. This is big theme, of course. I did not note any problems with AdBlock for now (i know that many times it is the matter of some block list - too many block lists slowing down the browser performance). But i will focus on HTTPS Everywhere add-on. It seems to me that the performance is weaker with this add-on.

Hadden89

@xtech HTTPS everywhere was pretty aggressive on ram (around 100mb in idle) time ago.
Something similar can be done with HSTS (vivaldi://net-internals/#hsts).
And I don't see the reason to enforce https even on sites where you don't input personal data.
An adblocker with the "essential rules" could help even if it takes a bit of ram (of course).
[Excluding the native adblocker which will come in next stable]

strange pop-up windows about lack of RAM.

You could try to tweak your paging file