18 ms·

The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

86 points by p3drosola 10y ago

Sarkie 10y ago
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/09/tab-discarding?hl=en https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/09/tab-discar...
- afsina 10y ago
  Also, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1thLjq-PYoKWaM_ODDZjojr9VRG6uGnxeL86EaSzYL5k/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1thLjq-PYoKWaM_ODDZjojr9V...
  - afsina 10y ago
    AFAIK this is part of the TRIM project in Blink, They have some memory related goals listed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17wW-YosF8tlEwn45eZ4delXWPDfWG70vmG-Gnc-63ro/edit?pref=2&pli=1#gid=1135956485 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17wW-YosF8tlEwn45eZ4d...
    - Sarkie 10y ago
      Brilliant, thanks for these links!
- alimbada 10y ago
  I think this feature would be much more useful if, instead of waiting for the system to run low on memory, I could define a memory usage threshold at which Chrome starts discarding tabs.
  - scholia 10y ago
    Agreed. It would also be nice to limit the number of separate processes that Chrome uses. It's interesting to compare RAM/resource usage of a blank page in Google Docs in Chrome with a lightweight program such as Microsoft Word ;-)
- ikeboy 10y ago
  I don't see any such flag, and about:discards and chrome://discards/ don't work. Has the feature been dropped in Chrome 50, or was it just never implemented for Linux?
amelius 10y ago
What happens when a tab is doing background work, such as uploading a file, or performing a calculation, or just keeping track of timer events? (Will those timer events appear to happen all at once when the task is resumed?)
- gcatalfamo 10y ago
  No, there might be some service disruption with ongoing task. However, you wouldn't use it on a working tab like that, but on those residing for "I might need this later" and hogging memory.
stan_rogers 10y ago
Turned that off almost immediately. Sounds good in theory, but if a suspended page has a heartbeat of any sort, it has to reload when you return to it. If that page is an infinite scroller, or if you've hit the "load more" button a couple of times, well, so much for starting up again where you left off.
- kranner 10y ago
  You can whitelist certain pages permanently which is what I do for the Twitter homepage. You can also keep them active for the current session only.
  - welanes 10y ago
    I thought that would do it but when you understand how you (I, at least) browse the web this feature became annoying, fast. Working on Nitrous IDE, take a break to read an article (on a page never before visited so not whitelisted). Check the Disqus comments, the article mentions a book on Amazon, check that out....oh no, my IDE page has just gone to sleep, now I have to reconfigure it again. Ah the article page went to sleep too, now I need to find where I am in the comments. Throw in the time for the pages to reload as well, and you can see how this could get frustrating.
- nfriedly 10y ago
  Mobile browsers already suspended most background stuff, and it occasionally does cause issues like that, but usually it just works. I learned this out a few years ago when trying to figure out why my metrics sometimes reported mobile visitors with load times of hours or even days... Turns out that they opened the site and then switched tabs/apps before it finished loading. Everything except that metric worked fine. I added a heartbeat just to detect that, and it worked without introducing any extra reloads.
  - takno 10y ago
    This always drives me mad. It's particularly bad if I'm trying to read content sites on a train or somewhere with patchy reception - open half a dozen tabs to give me something to read while I'm disconnected, and then switch to them only to see the content disappear before my eyes. I'd nominate it as literally the worst thing about mobile browsing
fullofstack 10y ago
Closing your tabs and using the browser's history achieves the same thing.
leni536 10y ago
Idea: What if there was an OS interface to mark memory regions as "throwaway"? Throwaway in the sense that it's less costly to recalculate than to recall it from swap. So the OS would throw such memory regions instead of swapping out and signal the process about it to recalculate it if needed. I don't usually bump into heavy swap usage except when I wake my laptop from hibernate. I tend to close browsers before hibernating because it's faster to just resume the last session from a cold start then load from swap.
- Kristine1975 10y ago
  Both OS X and iOS have the NSPurgeableData class which implements something like this: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/ManagingMemory/Articles/CachingandPurgeableMemory.html https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Perfor... Edit: Chromium has this: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/base/+/master/memory/discardable_memory.h https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/base/+/master...
  - leni536 10y ago
    "Discardable memory" doesn't seem to be implemented though, however there is an implementation for "discardable shared memory" [1] which seems to offer this volatile behavior. It uses ashmem_pin_region() and ashmem_unpin_region() for Android, which seems to be the equivalent for iOS's NSPurgeableData. I wonder if it does anything useful for any other OS. [1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/base/+/master/memory/discardable_shared_memory.cc https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/base/+/master...
- amelius 10y ago
  > Throwaway in the sense that it's less costly to recalculate than to recall it from swap. Network is slower than disk (is slower than memory). So if "recalculate" means getting it from the internet, then probably getting it from disk is faster in most cases.
  - daurnimator 10y ago
hga 10y ago
What I do, when Chrome, or rather, my abuse of it (14 windows, 735 tabs at the moment, Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit on a 32 GiB system) becomes onerous is to go to the task manager and kill groups of tabs taking up "too much" memory, and very occasionally, too much CPU. (I get away with that abuse, which it a bit higher right now because I'm in the process of buying a house, by killing all tabs after launching, and only enabling the ones I want, one by one, using the essential to me Session Buddy.)
- kn9 10y ago
  Guilty too
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Ah, good, it's not just me! One anecdote - 5 years ago FF was the clear winner for coping with tab abuse. Stable and coped with hundreds of tabs happily, Chrome started crashing pages beyond 50 or so. Now it's the perfect reverse, FF hates a lot of tabs open and Chrome is stable with apparently limitless numbers.
  - keeperofdakeys 10y ago
    Personally I have both working fine with hundreds of tabs, but chrome uses 5-10 times the ram.
    - anexprogrammer 10y ago
      Hmm. Maybe it's a FF add-on causing the problems for me, though I'm not using anything uncommon. An internal ps like chrome has might help pinning that down. Chrome is definitely the RAM greedy one (and so many processes!), and always has been.
      - keeperofdakeys 10y ago
        Firefox has "about:memory", which can give you some rather detailed information about memory usage.
jaksmit 10y ago
The Great Suspender has been around for a long time; I posted it to Product Hunt ~2 years ago: https://www.producthunt.com/tech/the-great-suspender https://www.producthunt.com/tech/the-great-suspender it's pretty good. I don't really use the auto mode much, but I use it to manually kill tabs (can be faster than killing via the task manager)
aavotins 10y ago
It's just incredible. Webpages are now filled with such bloat, that there are third party tools popping up to help users combat other third party developer solutions eating up resources on their systems.
maxschumacher91 10y ago
A tool that has served me well in freeing up memory (both in RAM and in my head) is one-tab: https://www.one-tab.com/ https://www.one-tab.com/ Afaik, current versions of Chrome already implement the functionality of the great suspender natively.
- Graziano_M 10y ago
  I am a big fan on one tab. It's replace my 'toread' and 'pocket' completely.
mdeeks 10y ago
The best use of this is for saving battery life. Chrome will absolutely destroy your battery. You can configure it to auto-suspend tabs after X minutes of inactivity only when you are on battery. (Alternatively you can switch to Safari to save battery life.) Like others have said, The Great Suspender will often break web pages and force them to completely reload. This ruins infinite scroller pages too. So thats the trade off.
illuminea 10y ago
I prefer to "snooze" tabs using the Tab Snooze Chrome Extension. That way they reappear when I can hopefully give them attention. I can tell the extension to put tabs to sleep until this evening, tomorrow, this weekend, next week (my fave), next month, someday (I haven't tried that one, too scary), or a specific date. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-snooze/pdiebiamhaleloakpcgmpnenggpjbcbm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-snooze/pdiebia...
dharma1 10y ago
great chrome addon, been using it for a year or two. I've got around 40-50 tabs open usually, and "spring clean" all but the active one a couple of times a day (right click a tab, close other tabs). Chrome used to be a complete memory hog until this addon.
andmarios 10y ago
Google should acquihire the team and embed it in Chrome. I use tabs as a task list (around 30-50 at a time) and without this tool I wouldn't be on my laptop, I would need a desktop with at least 64GB of RAM...
- basch 10y ago
  it's already built into chrome, my canary has been doing it for a while, pretty sure beta and dev do it now too.
  - andmarios 10y ago
    It hasn't arrived at beta yet but thanks for the heads up!
blazespin 10y ago
Just curious - how are you sure that the addon doesn't have some backchannel that it's using to send your website info to? Like, let's say you go on a banking website?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
klue07 10y ago
Any good alternatives recommended for Firefox?
- skrowl 10y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-plus/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-plus/ does the same thing (actually a little better in the implementation) on Firefox. Once you install, go into config for it and set how long a tab may be idle before it auto-unloads. Unloaded tabs are shown slightly dimmed in the tab bar. You can also right click tabs (such as gmail / youtube / etc) and force them to always stay loaded, so your email / music streaming / etc aren't impacted. Combo it with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-panorama/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa... that lets you organize your tabs into groups and you can have hundreds of well organized tabs without using much memory at all.
  - kasabali 10y ago
    > Combo it with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa.. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa.... that lets you organize your tabs into groups and you can have hundreds of well organized tabs without using much memory at all. Be careful with that because every tab has a constant memory consumption even when not loaded, so it will actually have a noticeable memory consumption when you have several hundreds of tabs. I learned it the hard way.
- kasabali 10y ago
  No need. Make sure "Don't load tabs until selected" option is enabled and then restart the browser once in a while.
forgotpwtomain 10y ago
Every single new chrome release memory consumption just gets worse. Most recently a single window with 1 gmail tab takes ~500mb (If I recall correctly you could actually run windows XP on 256). I'm seriously considering rolling my browsers back to ~2012 and never upgrading again.
- klue07 10y ago
  Except you'd have extremely vulnerable browsers.
- 8ig8 10y ago
  What about rolling your Gmail back to 2012 with the lighter HTML version... https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en I rolled back about a month ago to free up some resources since I have it open all day. So far, so good. As a bonus, you have to manually check for new mail, which I actually like.
- aug-riedinger 10y ago
  Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Gmail has an internal behavior that adapts its memory usage on available memory. It may fail in some specific situation (short and wide memory leak), but as a whole the idea is to use RAM as much as possible to make gmail faster. And yes, gmail lacks of a "low memory consumption" button for those situation where automatic memory usage detection fails. There is video of google explaining this voluntary behavior but I can't find it unfortunately.
  - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    > Unused RAM is wasted RAM. This is just ignorant cliche. > Gmail has an internal behavior that adapts its memory usage on available memory. It may fail in some specific situation (short and wide memory leak), but as a whole the idea is to use RAM as much as possible to make gmail faster. This has nothing to do with Gmail, this is entirely to do with chromium. When my X-Server starts to freeze because 8 tabs taking up 2GB of memory means the OS is intensely swapping to and from disk; I'll take my unused RAM, thanks.
antonycourtney 10y ago
Another useful tab manager extension for Chrome is Tabli (http://www.gettabli.com http://www.gettabli.com), which I created and submitted as a "Show HN" last October (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10464603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10464603). Helps you quickly find tabs you already have open and lets you save and restore windows (collections of tabs) with meaningful names to keep things organized. 100% Free Software (sources on github), respects privacy, and has keyboard shortcuts for efficiency.
- tmikaeld 10y ago
  I tried using that, but i keep getting this issue on OS X: https://i.imgur.com/PeZluRL.png https://i.imgur.com/PeZluRL.png This is not specific to Tabli though, it's every time there is an extension popup with content. Maybe it's something that can be fixed? Also, the open animation is painfully slow.
  - antonycourtney 10y ago
    Thanks for the bug report. I have seen that happen intermittently but have never managed to find a reliable repro. There's a long-standing open issue on github for it: https://github.com/antonycourtney/tabli/issues/45 https://github.com/antonycourtney/tabli/issues/45 I have new release of Tabli pending that will address a number of performance issues, so may resolve this for you. If you DM me I can let you know when it's available.
squas 10y ago
The Great Suspender allows me to keep many tabs (currently 214) open without CPU meltdown. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
audi100quattro 10y ago
Maybe Google could come up with a zero-cost tab and have users pick it (more than 10 tabs?) when they don't care about latency and pre-loading of webpages so much.

86 points by p3drosola 10y ago

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/09/tab-discarding?hl=en https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/09/tab-discar...

afsina 10y ago
Also, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1thLjq-PYoKWaM_ODDZjojr9VRG6uGnxeL86EaSzYL5k/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1thLjq-PYoKWaM_ODDZjojr9V...
- afsina 10y ago
  AFAIK this is part of the TRIM project in Blink, They have some memory related goals listed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17wW-YosF8tlEwn45eZ4delXWPDfWG70vmG-Gnc-63ro/edit?pref=2&pli=1#gid=1135956485 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17wW-YosF8tlEwn45eZ4d...
  - Sarkie 10y ago
    Brilliant, thanks for these links!
alimbada 10y ago
I think this feature would be much more useful if, instead of waiting for the system to run low on memory, I could define a memory usage threshold at which Chrome starts discarding tabs.
- scholia 10y ago
  Agreed. It would also be nice to limit the number of separate processes that Chrome uses. It's interesting to compare RAM/resource usage of a blank page in Google Docs in Chrome with a lightweight program such as Microsoft Word ;-)
ikeboy 10y ago
I don't see any such flag, and about:discards and chrome://discards/ don't work. Has the feature been dropped in Chrome 50, or was it just never implemented for Linux?

amelius 10y ago

What happens when a tab is doing background work, such as uploading a file, or performing a calculation, or just keeping track of timer events? (Will those timer events appear to happen all at once when the task is resumed?)

gcatalfamo 10y ago
No, there might be some service disruption with ongoing task. However, you wouldn't use it on a working tab like that, but on those residing for "I might need this later" and hogging memory.

stan_rogers 10y ago

Turned that off almost immediately. Sounds good in theory, but if a suspended page has a heartbeat of any sort, it has to reload when you return to it. If that page is an infinite scroller, or if you've hit the "load more" button a couple of times, well, so much for starting up again where you left off.

kranner 10y ago
You can whitelist certain pages permanently which is what I do for the Twitter homepage. You can also keep them active for the current session only.
- welanes 10y ago
  I thought that would do it but when you understand how you (I, at least) browse the web this feature became annoying, fast. Working on Nitrous IDE, take a break to read an article (on a page never before visited so not whitelisted). Check the Disqus comments, the article mentions a book on Amazon, check that out....oh no, my IDE page has just gone to sleep, now I have to reconfigure it again. Ah the article page went to sleep too, now I need to find where I am in the comments. Throw in the time for the pages to reload as well, and you can see how this could get frustrating.
nfriedly 10y ago
Mobile browsers already suspended most background stuff, and it occasionally does cause issues like that, but usually it just works. I learned this out a few years ago when trying to figure out why my metrics sometimes reported mobile visitors with load times of hours or even days... Turns out that they opened the site and then switched tabs/apps before it finished loading. Everything except that metric worked fine. I added a heartbeat just to detect that, and it worked without introducing any extra reloads.
- takno 10y ago
  This always drives me mad. It's particularly bad if I'm trying to read content sites on a train or somewhere with patchy reception - open half a dozen tabs to give me something to read while I'm disconnected, and then switch to them only to see the content disappear before my eyes. I'd nominate it as literally the worst thing about mobile browsing

fullofstack 10y ago

Closing your tabs and using the browser's history achieves the same thing.

leni536 10y ago

Idea: What if there was an OS interface to mark memory regions as "throwaway"? Throwaway in the sense that it's less costly to recalculate than to recall it from swap. So the OS would throw such memory regions instead of swapping out and signal the process about it to recalculate it if needed. I don't usually bump into heavy swap usage except when I wake my laptop from hibernate. I tend to close browsers before hibernating because it's faster to just resume the last session from a cold start then load from swap.

Kristine1975 10y ago
Both OS X and iOS have the NSPurgeableData class which implements something like this: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/ManagingMemory/Articles/CachingandPurgeableMemory.html https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Perfor... Edit: Chromium has this: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/base/+/master/memory/discardable_memory.h https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/base/+/master...
- leni536 10y ago
  "Discardable memory" doesn't seem to be implemented though, however there is an implementation for "discardable shared memory" [1] which seems to offer this volatile behavior. It uses ashmem_pin_region() and ashmem_unpin_region() for Android, which seems to be the equivalent for iOS's NSPurgeableData. I wonder if it does anything useful for any other OS. [1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/base/+/master/memory/discardable_shared_memory.cc https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/base/+/master...
amelius 10y ago
> Throwaway in the sense that it's less costly to recalculate than to recall it from swap. Network is slower than disk (is slower than memory). So if "recalculate" means getting it from the internet, then probably getting it from disk is faster in most cases.
- daurnimator 10y ago

hga 10y ago

What I do, when Chrome, or rather, my abuse of it (14 windows, 735 tabs at the moment, Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit on a 32 GiB system) becomes onerous is to go to the task manager and kill groups of tabs taking up "too much" memory, and very occasionally, too much CPU. (I get away with that abuse, which it a bit higher right now because I'm in the process of buying a house, by killing all tabs after launching, and only enabling the ones I want, one by one, using the essential to me Session Buddy.)

kn9 10y ago
Guilty too
anexprogrammer 10y ago
Ah, good, it's not just me! One anecdote - 5 years ago FF was the clear winner for coping with tab abuse. Stable and coped with hundreds of tabs happily, Chrome started crashing pages beyond 50 or so. Now it's the perfect reverse, FF hates a lot of tabs open and Chrome is stable with apparently limitless numbers.
- keeperofdakeys 10y ago
  Personally I have both working fine with hundreds of tabs, but chrome uses 5-10 times the ram.
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    Hmm. Maybe it's a FF add-on causing the problems for me, though I'm not using anything uncommon. An internal ps like chrome has might help pinning that down. Chrome is definitely the RAM greedy one (and so many processes!), and always has been.
    - keeperofdakeys 10y ago
      Firefox has "about:memory", which can give you some rather detailed information about memory usage.

jaksmit 10y ago

The Great Suspender has been around for a long time; I posted it to Product Hunt ~2 years ago: https://www.producthunt.com/tech/the-great-suspender https://www.producthunt.com/tech/the-great-suspender it's pretty good. I don't really use the auto mode much, but I use it to manually kill tabs (can be faster than killing via the task manager)

aavotins 10y ago

It's just incredible. Webpages are now filled with such bloat, that there are third party tools popping up to help users combat other third party developer solutions eating up resources on their systems.

maxschumacher91 10y ago

A tool that has served me well in freeing up memory (both in RAM and in my head) is one-tab: https://www.one-tab.com/ https://www.one-tab.com/ Afaik, current versions of Chrome already implement the functionality of the great suspender natively.

Graziano_M 10y ago
I am a big fan on one tab. It's replace my 'toread' and 'pocket' completely.

mdeeks 10y ago

The best use of this is for saving battery life. Chrome will absolutely destroy your battery. You can configure it to auto-suspend tabs after X minutes of inactivity only when you are on battery. (Alternatively you can switch to Safari to save battery life.) Like others have said, The Great Suspender will often break web pages and force them to completely reload. This ruins infinite scroller pages too. So thats the trade off.

illuminea 10y ago

I prefer to "snooze" tabs using the Tab Snooze Chrome Extension. That way they reappear when I can hopefully give them attention. I can tell the extension to put tabs to sleep until this evening, tomorrow, this weekend, next week (my fave), next month, someday (I haven't tried that one, too scary), or a specific date. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-snooze/pdiebiamhaleloakpcgmpnenggpjbcbm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-snooze/pdiebia...

dharma1 10y ago

great chrome addon, been using it for a year or two. I've got around 40-50 tabs open usually, and "spring clean" all but the active one a couple of times a day (right click a tab, close other tabs). Chrome used to be a complete memory hog until this addon.

andmarios 10y ago

Google should acquihire the team and embed it in Chrome. I use tabs as a task list (around 30-50 at a time) and without this tool I wouldn't be on my laptop, I would need a desktop with at least 64GB of RAM...

basch 10y ago
it's already built into chrome, my canary has been doing it for a while, pretty sure beta and dev do it now too.
- andmarios 10y ago
  It hasn't arrived at beta yet but thanks for the heads up!

blazespin 10y ago

Just curious - how are you sure that the addon doesn't have some backchannel that it's using to send your website info to? Like, let's say you go on a banking website?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

klue07 10y ago

Any good alternatives recommended for Firefox?

skrowl 10y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-plus/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-plus/ does the same thing (actually a little better in the implementation) on Firefox. Once you install, go into config for it and set how long a tab may be idle before it auto-unloads. Unloaded tabs are shown slightly dimmed in the tab bar. You can also right click tabs (such as gmail / youtube / etc) and force them to always stay loaded, so your email / music streaming / etc aren't impacted. Combo it with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-panorama/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa... that lets you organize your tabs into groups and you can have hundreds of well organized tabs without using much memory at all.
- kasabali 10y ago
  > Combo it with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa.. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa.... that lets you organize your tabs into groups and you can have hundreds of well organized tabs without using much memory at all. Be careful with that because every tab has a constant memory consumption even when not loaded, so it will actually have a noticeable memory consumption when you have several hundreds of tabs. I learned it the hard way.
kasabali 10y ago
No need. Make sure "Don't load tabs until selected" option is enabled and then restart the browser once in a while.

forgotpwtomain 10y ago

Every single new chrome release memory consumption just gets worse. Most recently a single window with 1 gmail tab takes ~500mb (If I recall correctly you could actually run windows XP on 256). I'm seriously considering rolling my browsers back to ~2012 and never upgrading again.

klue07 10y ago
Except you'd have extremely vulnerable browsers.
8ig8 10y ago
What about rolling your Gmail back to 2012 with the lighter HTML version... https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en I rolled back about a month ago to free up some resources since I have it open all day. So far, so good. As a bonus, you have to manually check for new mail, which I actually like.
aug-riedinger 10y ago
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Gmail has an internal behavior that adapts its memory usage on available memory. It may fail in some specific situation (short and wide memory leak), but as a whole the idea is to use RAM as much as possible to make gmail faster. And yes, gmail lacks of a "low memory consumption" button for those situation where automatic memory usage detection fails. There is video of google explaining this voluntary behavior but I can't find it unfortunately.
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago
  > Unused RAM is wasted RAM. This is just ignorant cliche. > Gmail has an internal behavior that adapts its memory usage on available memory. It may fail in some specific situation (short and wide memory leak), but as a whole the idea is to use RAM as much as possible to make gmail faster. This has nothing to do with Gmail, this is entirely to do with chromium. When my X-Server starts to freeze because 8 tabs taking up 2GB of memory means the OS is intensely swapping to and from disk; I'll take my unused RAM, thanks.

antonycourtney 10y ago

Another useful tab manager extension for Chrome is Tabli (http://www.gettabli.com http://www.gettabli.com), which I created and submitted as a "Show HN" last October (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10464603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10464603). Helps you quickly find tabs you already have open and lets you save and restore windows (collections of tabs) with meaningful names to keep things organized. 100% Free Software (sources on github), respects privacy, and has keyboard shortcuts for efficiency.

tmikaeld 10y ago
I tried using that, but i keep getting this issue on OS X: https://i.imgur.com/PeZluRL.png https://i.imgur.com/PeZluRL.png This is not specific to Tabli though, it's every time there is an extension popup with content. Maybe it's something that can be fixed? Also, the open animation is painfully slow.
- antonycourtney 10y ago
  Thanks for the bug report. I have seen that happen intermittently but have never managed to find a reliable repro. There's a long-standing open issue on github for it: https://github.com/antonycourtney/tabli/issues/45 https://github.com/antonycourtney/tabli/issues/45 I have new release of Tabli pending that will address a number of performance issues, so may resolve this for you. If you DM me I can let you know when it's available.

squas 10y ago

The Great Suspender allows me to keep many tabs (currently 214) open without CPU meltdown. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

audi100quattro 10y ago

Maybe Google could come up with a zero-cost tab and have users pick it (more than 10 tabs?) when they don't care about latency and pre-loading of webpages so much.