Blog Entry of 2009-Sep- 8 in PRTG 7
The Best Browser for PRTG (Part 3): The September 2009 Browser Shoot-Out
The web interface of PRTG uses a lot of AJAX and Javascript functions, so brower javascript performance is crucial for us. The latest versions of the most common web browsers (Safari 4, Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome 2 and Internet Explorer 8) have recently shown great performance improvements for Javascripts processing - mainly due to their new just-in-time compilers (JIT).
We already conducted browser shoot-outs with PRTG last year in September (Winner: Firefox 3) and in February this year (Winner: Google Chrome). Now we wanted to know what has changed in the last 6 months:
Test Setup
In this latest benchmark test we used the web interface of the upcoming PRTG Network Monitor V7.2 to measure the performance of the four contestants. 5 minutes after starting a browser and 9 hours later we measured browser memory usage as well as script performance with PRTG's built-in browser benchmark. This benchmark combines the run times of various Javascript functions that PRTG uses for its web interface. The refresh interval was set to 10 seconds so after 9 hours we have actually simulated running the browser for 54 hours or more than 2 days (with the default refresh interval of 60 seconds).Browser Javscript Performance
Here are the results for the performance measurements:
With a fresh browser Safari beats all others with 437 ms, closely followed by Chrome with 470 ms. Firefox is the middle class with 758 ms and IE8 - as expected - being the slowest with 1114 ms. But after 9 hours of AJAX browser refreshes the 1st place goes to Chrome which only slowed down by 21%. Firefox is now second (only 6% slower) and even IE8 (26% slowdown) now beats Safari which slowed down by incredible 247%.
Browser Memory Usage
When we tried to find the reason we found that Safari's memory usage grew most:
Browser memory usage of Safari and IE grew by 8 times during the 9 hour test, Firefox grew by 88% and Chrome takes the 1st place in this category with only 31% more memory usage after 9 hours. Safari obviously has the fastest javascript engine but - over time - it is slowed down by a not-as-good memory management.