Memory Savings in Brave: 33% to 66% memory reduction over Chrome

 This research was conducted by Dr. Andrius Aucinas, performance researcher at Brave, and Dr. Ben Livshits, Brave’s Chief Scientist.

We are continuing our series of posts evaluating Brave browser’s performance. This time we look at one aspect that often frustrates web users: the browsers’ memory consumption. Also, the virtue of aggressive blocking. Modern browsers have become fairly streamlined — a standard version of Google Chrome browser barely takes more than 200 MB of memory. However, websites have grown in complexity and resource use, an effect exacerbated by ads and trackers. We discover that Brave delivers an impressive 33% to 66% memory reduction over a vanilla Chrome measured on a browser with a typical number of open tabs.

Methodology

We compared Chrome (v. 71.0.3578.98) running with no blocker, Chrome with AdBlock Plus (v. 3.4.0) as well as uBlock Origin (v. 1.17.0_0), and Brave (v. 0.58.21, with underlying Chromium v. 71.0.3578.98). All extensions were used with default settings, because users tend to stick to defaults. We ran all tests on a powerful macOS laptop, MacBook Pro (2018) with an Intel Core i7 6-core CPU and 32 GB RAM, to ensure that our measurements are not skewed by memory backpressure of the underlying system. We then also verified the results using an older MacBook Air laptop (mid 2012) with a dual-core CPU and 4 GB RAM for a measure that is more representative of an average desktop user.

Although we generally use tools like Web Replay Proxy to eliminate page variations across test runs, such tools have shortcomings when it comes to deterministically replaying non-deterministic content, where we have observed a small number of requests failing. For this study we therefore used live versions of the websites, re-running each experiment several times to check for variance.

Finally, we are huge fans of GDPR in Europe. However, the additional friction of the consent requests does impact the user experience, and the default tracking that happens on the web. To provide a more complete picture, we ran our tests from both a UK business IP address as well as US IP address over VPN (the VPN exit node was hosted in a US region of AWS). Although AWS IP addresses can sometimes be blocked by various publishers to prevent automated web scraping, we did not observe any such cases across our chosen set of sites.

For memory measurements we relied on Chromium’s tracing tools, specifically, browser startup tracing, running the browser with a few flags disabling features that can add variance but which are not important for our tests. What the different options do is primarily disable chromium features that may cause unpredictable behavior, such as updating safe browsing rules in background: