I think at this point the apps themselves have a bigger impact than the OS. Websites can easily take 50-100 MB of RAM these days, each. Open a few of those, and you can already slow down your PC with low RAM.
All of these "low-end" operating systems should have at least 1 GB of RAM as the bare minimum, and something with a more modern OS like Ubuntu or Windows 7 should use at least 2 GB of RAM, otherwise you have the same problem.
What sorts of websites are we talking about here? I understand that some websites have to transfer a couple of megabytes to be displayed (though most of that is media content anyway) but how does that end up occupying 100MB of RAM? That's roughly an order of magnitude more than I'd like a website to take, except for when we're talking streaming media obviously.
Looking at Chrome's Task Manager: my Gmail tab weighs in at 255 MB. Facebook is #2, at 168 MB. All that client-side JS gets pretty heavy.
Interestingly, #3 is the home page of an old blogspot.com blog. It's mostly just text and a few inline images, and it still somehow manages to occupy 132 MB of RAM.
I use a web IM client, it can easily consume hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes if left open for a few days, and that is just to send small snippets of text back and forth!
About:Memory in Firefox right now, with nothing other than this reply box open, shows JS using 67.29MB and well over 100MB of memory used for other purposes.
(Likely this is left over from tabs I have closed)
About:Memory in Firefox right now, with nothing other than this reply box open, shows JS using 67.29MB and well over 100MB of memory used for other purposes.
(Likely this is left over from tabs I have closed)
I think it's just general overhead, since I have similar figures when starting FF fresh with no tabs.
If you look at "window-objects" under explicit allocations, you can see the memory for individual pages; the page of your parent comment weighs 2.2 MB for me.
But that's without history... when you click links, it will keep the previous pages cached, and I think that is what can really eat a lot of memory real quick. But I would also hope that memory gets released without much of a fuss? I don't know that, but if the RAM is made available when system resources get low, I'd say cache away, since unused RAM just eats electricity for nothing :P
All of these "low-end" operating systems should have at least 1 GB of RAM as the bare minimum, and something with a more modern OS like Ubuntu or Windows 7 should use at least 2 GB of RAM, otherwise you have the same problem.