96 MiB versus 1,402 MiB — 93% less working set in this setup.
Raw samples CSV · Structured summary
# Tide versus Chrome: matched audio playback 26 October 2026. Tide 0.4.2 versus signed-in YouTube Music in Chrome, Song mode. Same public track (Where We Started, Lost Sky & Jex; U9pGr6KMdyg). Tide full Home interface, Chrome one music tab. Existing Zen and Edge windows were left untouched and excluded. | App | Median working set | Median private bytes | |---|---:|---:| | Tide and playback helpers | 95.53 MiB | 62.61 MiB | | Chrome process tree, observation tooling excluded | 1401.68 MiB | 1064.13 MiB | Working-set difference: 1306.15 MiB. Tide used 93.18% less in this test; the ad rounds down to 93%. Two fresh-process Tide runs and one Chrome run were completed. Each run sampled 45 times at a requested one-second interval plus process enumeration overhead. First ten samples omitted. Each condition uses the median of its available run medians. The two Tide medians were 93.89 and 97.16 MiB; there is no Chrome run-to-run variability estimate. Raw CSVs and process names are retained. Playback progress and Song-mode selection were checked in the actual UI; no synthetic library or altered application code was used. No video, game or browser-comparison FPS result is inferred. Chrome's Codex observation extension host and its command/console wrappers are instrumentation and excluded. Raw totals remain in the CSVs. Browser processes, including renderer, GPU, network and loaded extension processes, are included. This tests the existing signed-in Chrome profile, not an extension-free browser baseline. Chrome and Tide retain their normal different UI surfaces and library models. The browser test selects Song after the page loads; earlier video-mode/incognito samples were excluded as pilots. This establishes the observed difference for this setup. It does not isolate language/runtime effects, every browser configuration, transient extraction peaks, longer sessions, every track, game FPS or physical memory sharing. Summed working sets may double-count shared pages. Private bytes are reported separately and are not interchangeable with resident RAM. Per-run medians: - tide-live-1: 93.89 MiB working set; 64.89 MiB private. - tide-live-2: 97.16 MiB working set; 60.32 MiB private. - chrome-song-1: 1401.68 MiB working set; 1064.13 MiB private.