What would be your minimum CPU recommendation for a Linux OS based browser build?

[cbn]

When I use the term "browser build" I am referring to a machine that is primarily used for browsing. Assume 4 to 6 hours a day of usage.

For hardware limit choices to recent (2013 and Newer) processors. Examples: Intel Haswell, AMD Kaveri, AMD Kabini, Intel Bay Trail and newer.

Here are my choices:

For Firefox in Linux-

Intel: Celeron G1820
AMD: Any Kaveri dual core

For Blink based browsers (Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, etc) in Linux-

Intel: ??? (I haven't used Silvermont or Airmont atom yet with Linux, so I can't comment) Apollo Lake (Goldmont atom)?
AMD: Athlon 5350 or A6-5200

 

[VirtualLarry]

Seriously, you would be hard-pressed to go wrong with a Haswell Celeron. Only problem is, that they might be MORE expensive than a Skylake Celeron at this point. It's a shame that RAM and SSD prices have been increasing by around 30-35% here in the USA.

Those factors make it difficult to build a truly "cheap" box.

Remember when OEM Windows licenses seemed to be substantially cheaper than retail, too? Now, it seems that the price is indistinguishable from Retail.

I wouldn't have a problem paying $50 for Windows, for a $300 box. But $100-140 is a bit hard to swallow.

 

[Torn Mind]

Core i5-6600 for non-Chrome. That's because stuff like Pale Moon exists and Pale Moon is a sloth. Firefox has improved from its horrid days while Pale Moon is a throwback. But Firefox is still a loafing sloth that runs like garbage on weak hardware. i3s are ok for Chrome and its brethren, but barely so.
Chrome eats up tabs like a fricking maniac and if you get a huge burst of curiosity or have a habit of visiting heavy sites like Facebook, Amazon, Ebay, news sites of any sort, the poor thing will bog down eventually. The SSD can mask the effects, but not everything is disk accesses with regards to Web browsing.

RAM of 8GBs is cutting it close. 16 GBs would be enough to give it air for a 6 hour browsing session.

 

[VirtualLarry]

AM of 8GBs is cutting it close. 16 GBs would be enough to give it air for a 6 hour browsing session.

That seems like maybe just a little bit overkill. I used to have nearly 100 forum tabs open in Waterfox, and only take up 3GB of RAM.

But that was before Firefox 49.0.2. I've seen that gobble 8GB after left idle for half a day, so maybe you're right.

 

[Torn Mind]

That seems like maybe just a little bit overkill. I used to have nearly 100 forum tabs open in Waterfox, and only take up 3GB of RAM.

But that was before Firefox 49.0.2. I've seen that gobble 8GB after left idle for half a day, so maybe you're right.

Old vBulletin with NoScript was not very heavy. New Anandtech forums seem that have little more advertisement, and certainly more scripts. It still isn't Amazon or Ebay. Plays.tv is the worst if you don't close its tab.
Chrome is far thirstier than FF. It's easy to hit 30GBs of RAM and pagefile and while an SSD can mask the delay, especially when there is a another task accessing the hard drive, there is still a slight uptick. Probably tolerable on an SSD, but at that point, stuff starts running out of memory and the like. But despite the RAM thirst, it is far snappier.

I used to run SSD+2.6 Celeron G550. Even then, I gravitated away from Firefox and IE because they suck when the tabs got too heavy. Recently, Using Pale Moon on Ebay has stuff like Ebay totally crushing it with some background script and eventually, the "Stop Script" option finally pops up, and this was with an i7 3770K with SpeedStep disabled, although on a HDD.

But now Chrome sucks too. It literally seems like it "separates" from the data it is supposed to manage with the latest version. As a result, the tabs all become borked and you can't load a single page. Try it and it just spins in a circle all day long. You have to shut the browser down entirely.

Man, the browser software landscape is horrible. Opera is crappy Chrome clone last I tried it a year a ago or however long. Too many tabs crushed it to a crawl.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Wow, sounds like you need a Broadwell-E 10-core, just for Chrome usage, if your example is typical.

 

[cbn]

Chrome eats up tabs like a fricking maniac and if you get a huge burst of curiosity or have a habit of visiting heavy sites like Facebook, Amazon, Ebay, news sites of any sort, the poor thing will bog down eventually. The SSD can mask the effects, but not everything is disk accesses with regards to Web browsing.

RAM of 8GBs is cutting it close. 16 GBs would be enough to give it air for a 6 hour browsing session.

That seems like maybe just a little bit overkill. I used to have nearly 100 forum tabs open in Waterfox, and only take up 3GB of RAM.

But that was before Firefox 49.0.2. I've seen that gobble 8GB after left idle for half a day, so maybe you're right.

He's right about the RAM usage for Chrome though. Your Firefox based browser uses less:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3052...s-outshine-slightly-sluggish-performance.html

 

[Torn Mind]

Wow, sounds like you need a Broadwell-E 10-core, just for Chrome usage, if your example is typical.

That is the paradox. Despite gobbling up RAM and pagefile, I preferred Chrome on the weaker processors and less system memory.

This also applies to tablets like the 2012 Nexus 7. The real Firefox was pretty unbearable. Chrome could at least render websites with some snap.

 

[Justinbaileyman]

Op I vote for going skylake. no reason go take a step back in tech when you can go new for the same price. I would say go g4400,Any B150 motherboard on sale and 4GB DDR4. You can do this for like $100-$150 total.

 

[cbn]

Seriously, you would be hard-pressed to go wrong with a Haswell Celeron. Only problem is, that they might be MORE expensive than a Skylake Celeron at this point.

Going by current prices for some reason the Haswell G1820 Celeron ($45.36 FS from Amazon) is more expensive that the Haswell G1840 Celeron ($43.40 FS from Amazon):

https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Celero...477114506&sr=1-1&keywords=Intel+Celeron+G1820

https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Celero...sr=1-1&keywords=Intel+Celeron+G1840+Processor

Meanwhile cheapest place I can find Skylake G3900 Celeron is Newegg at $43.26 free shipping:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G41G0265

With that mentioned, I have found that the Kaveri dual cores (and A4-7300) can often be found really cheap.

Example:

https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...-a6-7470k-apu-59-99-ar-free-shipping.2482483/

And there is also this one currently on sale at Fry's (though I think the 8 x 6 Gbps SATA ports are overkill for a Browser build).

 

[Torn Mind]

Wow, sounds like you need a Broadwell-E 10-core, just for Chrome usage, if your example is typical.

No, just lots of RAM, an SSD, and another SSD for the pagefile for "perfect" optimization. With regards to rendering speed, the i7-6700K is the top cat as you can't beat 4.0 GHz with Intel's IPC.

A Dual socket E5-2687W v4 in a proper server motherboard with C-series with maximum ECC RAM--what is it 512 or 1 TB?--would make for superior stability and lasting power into the thousands of tabs, but not even I would go that far. X99 doesn't interest me as much as Xeon land. It merely exists for gamers and e-peen strokers, not for browsing. I am speculating here in this paragraph, since I certainly cannot afford $4000 worth of CPU.

 

[richaron]

I have a Kaveri A8-7600 & 16GB running Ubuntu as a second build and currently hosting my raidz2 storage (which can use up a LOT of RAM).

CPU bogs down running Firefox and half a dozen crappy pages full of scripts/ads, but with a noscript-type plugin the sky's the limit. And 16GB RAM would be overkill if not for the raid. I would say the integrated GPU is overkill just for browsing as well. So if just for browsing, and if costs are the same, I would go for Intel with a stronger CPU & weaker GPU.

Edit: And I've noticed in Firefox when the CPU bogs down it's running 100% on two threads, so it's not using the second ~core in each cluster. Therefore I wouldn't want to use less than a dual cluster, ~quad core, APU

 

[rchunter]

My linux machine cpu is a $60 Xeon X5660, 12GB ram. It does plenty good enough but then i'm only using firefox. I don't run google chrome at all.

 

[lolfail9001]

No, just lots of RAM, an SSD, and another SSD for the pagefile for "perfect" optimization. With regards to rendering speed, the i7-6700K is the top cat as you can't beat 4.0 GHz with Intel's IPC.

A Dual socket E5-2687W v4 in a proper server motherboard with C-series with maximum ECC RAM--what is it 512 or 1 TB?--would make for superior stability and lasting power into the thousands of tabs, but not even I would go that far. X99 doesn't interest me as much as Xeon land. It merely exists for gamers and e-peen strokers, not for browsing. I am speculating here in this paragraph, since I certainly cannot afford $4000 worth of CPU.

Just saying: X99 is C612 (or whatever the Wellsburg server chipset is).

 

[Justinbaileyman]

Op, the point of going cheap Skylake would be that you could upgrade to something better in the future when needed such as an 6600k or 6700k or even the newly coming 7700k.Not that I am trying to push Intel on you at all cause if you can wait like another week or two the new AMD Bristol Ridge APU's will be out that should walk all over Celeron and Pentium parts.

 

[escrow4]

i5 6600 non K with 16GB of DDR4 2666MHz on a Z170 board with a 512GB PCI-E SSD will do it. No bottlenecks period.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I just realized that the subject was Linux browser box. I'll re-iterate my suggestion for a Haswell Celeron, over a Skylake Celeron (if the price difference isn't major), because Linux currently seems to have better support for Haswell than Skylake. Though, I don't know by how much, only that I've read much of Skylake's power-management isn't supported yet.

 

[whm1974]

My dad is using a Haswell Pentium with 8 GB of memory and a HDD running Firefox on Linux just fine.

 

[cbn]

Regarding future CPU choice for Firefox here is some info from the Mozilla blog on their developing Multi process known as Electrolysis or "e10s":

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/08/02/whats-next-for-multi-process-firefox/

(Keep in mind the current Firefox release is 49 so the first phase of multi process is already underway)

What’s Next for Multi-process Firefox

By Asa Dotzler and Brad Lassey

Electrolysis is the project name for Mozilla’s efforts to split Firefox into multiple processes to improve responsiveness, stability, and security. The first phase of this work was to split Firefox into a UI process and a content process.

This first phase of enabling our multi-process architecture is making its way to some of our Firefox 48 users starting this week. This is the biggest change we’ve ever made to Firefox, so we’re rolling it out slowly. For Firefox 48, we’re only enabling it for classes of users that our testing shows it works well for and to begin with, we’ll only enable it for 1% of those users so we can check on the stability and engagement data and make sure nothing new and bad is showing up. After that initial period, if all looks well, we’ll ramp up to 100% of those users, which will be about half of all Firefox 48 users.



Add-ons

If our Beta testing goes well, in Firefox 49 we will enable the multi-process architecture for users with a small set of add-ons that are known to work well with the multi-process architecture. In Firefox 50, again provided beta testing goes well, we plan to enable the multi-process architecture for users with add-ons that have either set a flag to say they are compatible or that were built with our new WebExtensions add-on API which is compatible by design. Eventually we will enable the multi-process architecture for all users and add-ons that are incompatible may no longer work. For this reason it is imperative that add-on authors update their add-ons to be compatible with the multi-process architecture.

Accessibility and touch screens
The next major multi-process update is scheduled for Firefox 51 when we’ll ship it to users with touchscreens, accessibility, and right to left browsers. That will conclude the first phase of our roll-out of the basic process separation that brings responsiveness to the Firefox UI, even when heavy pages are loading.

That’s not the end of our multi-process work. Not even close.

Multiple content processes
The second phase of this effort is to support multiple content processes. Where before we split content from UI so that pages loading wouldn’t slow down the UI, next up we’re splitting up the content processes so that one heavy page loading cannot slow down or hang pages loading in other tabs. This work is underway and should be available in the first half of 2017.

In parallel to work on multiple content processes, we’re also working on building a hardened sandbox for content processes. The goal for sandboxing is to restrict what access processes that host web content have to the browser and to the operating system. This will help secure Firefox against a range of potential exploits. If all goes well in testing, this work could see release this year.

Out of process add-ons

The final piece of this multi-process work will be to isolate extensions into their own sandboxed processes. Similar to how isolating and sandboxing web pages can help improve performance and prevent security exploits, putting extensions into their own process will make sure that an extension doesn’t slow down the browser or web pages and will help to prevent some classes of attacks on Firefox that could happen through extensions. We’re still in the preliminary phase of this work.

 

[cbn]

An article on Firefox that mentions some new tech (the servo engine) that goes beyond Electrolysis :

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/firefox-quantum-leap-performance-security,32938.html

Second Step: Gradual Adoption Of Servo Components And The Rust Language

In 2013, Mozilla started developing the Servo browser engine in the Rust language, as a research alternative to its in-production Gecko engine. The new engine aimed to eliminate entire classes of bugs such as buffer overflows by utilizing Rust, which is thread- and memory-safe, and also see what could be done with a brand new browser engine that doesn’t need to support any legacy code.

Due to the focus of Rust on high-parallelism, Servo can take advantage of all of a CPU’s threads to load a page. Therefore, it can increase the performance of page loads by up to 4x for many users of multi-core computers and devices.

Servo vs Gecko time to load page (less is better)For now, Servo itself remains a continuously developed research project, but Mozilla doesn’t plan to replace Gecko with Servo anytime soon. Instead, the organization seems to have adopted a more modular (and gradual) approach by replacing Gecko components with Servo components one by one.
Mozilla is internally calling this project “Quantum,” referring to the “quantum leap” in performance it expects Firefox to gain once enough of Servo’s components have been added to the browser.

"We are striving for performance gains from Quantum that will be so noticeable that your entire web experience will feel different,” said David Bryant, Head of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, in a Medium post.

“Pages will load faster, and scrolling will be silky smooth. Animations and interactive apps will respond instantly, and be able to handle more intensive content while holding consistent frame rates. And the content most important to you will automatically get the highest priority, focusing processing power where you need it the most,” he added.

Bryant also said that the plan is to rethink and re-engineer foundational building blocks of the browser engine used by Mozilla, with much of the work already being done by the Servo team and the community behind it. Electrolysis has also been an important precursor step because Firefox's new multi-process architecture will help the highly-parallelized Servo code to maximize the performance of the Firefox browser.

 

[crashtech]

It's about time they modernized Firefox. One errant tab will still bring the whole house crashing down.

 

[VirtualLarry]

It's about time they modernized Firefox. One errant tab will still bring the whole house crashing down.

They've already fixed that issue, apparently. I got a call from a relative the other day, and they said that one of their tabs crashed, and Firefox was prompting them to send a "Crash Report", for the crashed tab, and to restart the tab.

 

[crashtech]

They've already fixed that issue, apparently. I got a call from a relative the other day, and they said that one of their tabs crashed, and Firefox was prompting them to send a "Crash Report", for the crashed tab, and to restart the tab.

Interesting if true, and if so, why are they still moving toward the multi-process release?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I think that's with Multi-Process enabled, actually. They've already rolled out the first stage of it.

I'm interested in the new renderer and JavaScript written in Rust. Hopefully, when that is finished, Firefox will scale to N cores effectively.

Although, I'm seeing MUCH better performance, with a 4.0Ghz G3258 Haswell dual-core, than with a 2.4Ghz J1900 Bay Trail Atom quad-core. (Ok, the GTX950 2GB plugged into the G3258 probably helps too.)

 

[Torn Mind]

I think that's with Multi-Process enabled, actually. They've already rolled out the first stage of it.

I'm interested in the new renderer and JavaScript written in Rust. Hopefully, when that is finished, Firefox will scale to N cores effectively.

Although, I'm seeing MUCH better performance, with a 4.0Ghz G3258 Haswell dual-core, than with a 2.4Ghz J1900 Bay Trail Atom quad-core. (Ok, the GTX950 2GB plugged into the G3258 probably helps too.)

Disable hardware acceleration bud. Or stick the cable in the mobo's video output. Only then can you see if graphics matter.

It makes perfect sense however, given that a Haswell Celeron "core" is at least 4.5 times faster than a pathetic Atom.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1229?vs=1260
Cinebench single thread for an Atom C2750 is 41. A 4.0 Ghz Haswell Core(i7-4790) has a score of 181.

Multiple cores don't start to matter until many cores are open anyway. If there are 1-5 tabs open, the limiting factor is the scripts on the pages(and that is mostly single threaded) and a desktop Haswell blows through them like nothing while an Atom stuggles still.