13 ms·

awesome news then, chrome really needs to improve memory usage, especially when I have lots of tabs open. under firefox I normally had 120 tabs open all the ti

by ausjke 10y ago

awesome news then, chrome really needs to improve memory usage, especially when I have lots of tabs open. under firefox I normally had 120 tabs open all the time, and it's fine. with chrome, I dare not to exceed 60 tabs. chrome triggers heavy swap all the time still, which renders the system very sluggish.

curiousgal 10y ago
120 tabs?! What for?!
- setq 10y ago
  I do this. It's a curse. I don't know why.
  - Buge 10y ago
    I once had 1000 tabs open in firefox. I only found out when I accidentally clicked the x and it asked "are you sure you want to close 1000 tabs".
- wiredfool 10y ago
  Tabs are the new bookmarks.
  - tdkl 10y ago
    Sadly they aren't bookmarks and then people moan about memory usage, when they should get a reality check instead.
    - to3m 10y ago
      I don't know if you're familiar with the ins and outs of writing computer programs, but it's actually often practical to make a program that does one thing do another instead. So in this case one obvious thing that could be done is to have a dormant-type (exact terminology TBC) tab. Such things would have an entry on the tab bar like a normal tab, but wouldn't actually have anything loaded until you clicked. Firefox already supports this sort of thing internally, it looks like, since when you reload a session that had a bunch of open tabs, it doesn't seem to load each tab's contents until you click on it. (Open such a thing with a particular shortcut, or by transforming an existing tab into a dormant one - obviously equivalent in terms of JS callbacks and so on to closing the window.) Other possibilities could include multiple types of tabs, and/or alternative UIs for lists of pages you like/pages you want to look at sometime soon.
      - curiousgal 10y ago
        >it's actually often practical to make a program that does one thing do another instead Like using Photoshop to abort a system shutdown if you forgot to commit.[0] 0.https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-greatest-software-misuses/answer/Sourabh-Singh-2 https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-greatest-software-misuses...
        hugodahl 10y ago
        On Windows, using the built in notepad, you can block any shutdown by having an instance pen with any unsaved changes. Handy when Windows schedules a reboot and you've got your debugging session setup just right.
        Tempest1981 10y ago
        I read that Win10 will still force a scheduled reboot, even with unsaved documents: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3hb614/windows_10_automatic_updates_restarting_computer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3hb614/windows_10...
    - robotresearcher 10y ago
      Now we know how people behave we can engineer the software to work well for them. Suspend the LRU tabs so they can be paged out, etc.
    - PeCaN 10y ago
      just curious if you've ever used a computer Pretty sure users aren't the ones that need a reality check, go fuck yourself.
      - grzm 10y ago
        go fuck yourself Please don't be uncivil on HN, regardless of the discussion.
        PeCaN 10y ago
        go fuck yourself
      - sctb 10y ago
        We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the guidelines after we've asked you to stop. This account has posted a lot of decent comments, so we'd be very glad to unban it if you email hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll stop breaking the guidelines.
  - sker 10y ago
    They're better. If I bookmark something with any service, chances of me ever checking that out again drop to nearly zero. Tabs, by virtue of being there bugging you, are bookmarks, to-do lists, and task reminders all in one.
    - truth_sentinell 10y ago
      No, they aren't. I don't know about you, but I can't have more than 20 tabs open and consciously be aware of the content. I can't think of people like above, having 120 tabs. It's probably a waste of time and resources. First because you can't possibly hold in your memory 120 tabs, thus you'll have to visit them or read the title to remind you why is it there on the first place. With bookmarks at least you can use the search bar... So it ends up being counterproductive.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - xorxornop 10y ago
        Naw, at least with me I seem to be able to by treating the tab ordering as a conceptual discovery ordering. That is, I remember what things I learned / researched prior to and following each tab. It's lossy, but because each has a unique relationship with its surrounding concepts there's plenty of opportunities for parity-like behaviour; redundancy. When researching a thing I'll open up some high level page about it, then do breadth-first searches of tab contents, opening up new tabs whenever I see something that looks interesting, has wider implications, or possibly has some weaker relationship to a thing with one or both of those properties and I think I might be able to traverse the concept graph this way to find it / them. So I end up with a sort of flat tree where it corresponds almost directly to my earlier thought graph which produced them. I can work with maybe 200 this way... But not more. Unless I open them in different windows - sometimes different browsers, actually, to help further differentiate/compartmentalise them (eg. I'll use this strategy for largely disparate topics). Then, well, I'm not sure where I top out, all I can say is I once crashed my box from out of memory (not running swap), and it's a 32GB box soooo... I dunno. There are likely many others that work this way. Perhaps it's not common, but I also feel that it's very unlikely unique!
- spacehacker 10y ago
  I personally use tabs like a desktop with all kinds of papers, documents and books flying around. Sort of like this: https://s15.postimg.org/dpq7mpmaz/messydesk.jpg https://s15.postimg.org/dpq7mpmaz/messydesk.jpg
  - srathi 10y ago
    That seems like Einstein's desk. Is that correct? I remember seeing this picture before.
- Theodores 10y ago
  Sometimes I open 100 or so tabs to do repetitive stuff I cannot code, data entry work that won't be easily automated or needs the human touch, e.g. updating a product catalogue. On top of the 10-50 tabs open that gets to be a lot of heavy pages but makes for an efficient workflow. With hot keys and 'close all tabs to the right' I can quickly get through a lot of stuff that needs attention to detail and focus to get done. All I am saying is that there are situations when a lot of tabs is the best option given the circumstances, e.g. lots of data entry work.
- Theodores 10y ago
  Sometimes I open 100 or so tabs to do repetitive stuff I cannot code, data entry work that won't be easily automated or needs the human touch, e.g. updating a product catalogue. On top of the 10-50 tabs open that gets to be a lot of heavy pages but makes for an efficient workflow. With hot keys and 'close all tabs to the right' I can quickly get through a lot of stuff that needs attention to detail and focus to get done. All I am saying is that there are situations when a lot of tabs is the best option given the circumstances, e.g. lots of data entry work.
thejay 10y ago
I too keep a lot of tabs open. I use OneTab and The Great Suspender chrome extensions to also keep memory usage under control. They've been indispensable tools for the tab hoarders like me.
- ausjke 10y ago
  great, did not know this, I do use clutter-free extension all the time which avoids the same URL on multiple tabs.
- ilaksh 10y ago
  Exactly. Its hoarding. So eventually they will have to build in features to protect hoarders from themselves.
jcoffland 10y ago
This is mainly because Chrome allocates a process for each page whereas FF only allocates a thread. The important factor being that threads share an address space where processes are allocated their own and thus consume more memory. Separate processes are arguably more secure and of one process crashes it does not take down the whole browser but all this comes at a cost. This cost is very apparent with many tabs open.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  > processes are allocated their own and thus consume more memory. Copy-on-write means this needn't be a large overhead. Only pages that change after forking are duplicated.
  - mortehu 10y ago
    But the OS is committing to supplying memory for any writable pages you duplicated, because after all you might write to them. The OS doesn't know which pages you won't duplicate. Unless you set your vm.overcommit_memory sysctl variable to 1 (= never refuse malloc), duplicated writable pages are going to subtract from available memory, even if all copies are currently the same.
    - robotresearcher 10y ago
      Sure. So your memory usage is reported as high but might not be actually high. Some sophistication is needed to interpret resource counts.
- fulafel 10y ago
  The primary security gain of sandboxing is about making it harder for web content to hijack your computer by exploiting security bugs. Many common types of bugs can be exploited to get remote code execution in browsers because of unsafe programming languages used (C/C++). Both Chrome and Firefox have multi-process sandboxes now, Firefox is a little behind and plans to enable multiple content processes next year. While Chrome's is more granular, it does share processes between web pages from the same domain so won't start a new one for quite every tab.
kilroy123 10y ago
I can't recommend this extension enough, The Great Suspender: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... It freezes your tab after a set amount of time, freeing up the memory for each tab.
- raarts 10y ago
  And it's also a huge battery saver.
nazri1 10y ago
My laptop has no ssd. This sluggishness brings back memories of linux trashing the swap partition when it ran out of memory back in the early 2000s. Quite understandable since back then most people don't have that much RAM (64Mb?). Nowadays I have 8Gb on my laptop and I run linux with swap disabled. The only disk trashing that I'm having nowadays is due to chrome, and it's definitely not due to swap but the effect is almost the same - at best the laptop is unusable for up to 30 seconds, at worst, I have to do a hard reboot because that's the only way to recover - I can't even switch to a new terminal to kill chrome. Attempts to log in via the tty console (Ctrl+Alt+F2) in order to kill chrome is futile. I could enter the username, but the password prompt took forever to appear. Most of the time it expires after 60 seconds. If I manage to enter the password, the shell prompt can take forever to appear. Nowadays I do a "killall chrome; sleep 2; killall chrome" whenever it starts to trash the disk and giving me the bad vibe.
- kofejnik 10y ago
  put chrome cache on a ram disk, helped me a lot last time I had a spinning hdd
weaksauce 10y ago
I made a simple firefox/chrome extension for people that horde tabs as temp bookmarks. You might find it useful to find tabs and quickly navigate to them by clicking on the link in the list. It's free and open source. The github page has a gif showing usage. You can also type cmd-shift-e or ctrl-shift-e to switch to it. Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiogfkaldbfphfdkpggjemaha https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog... Firefox Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ source code: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist Let me know if you find it useful or have any suggestions. (patches are awesome too)
- sunnyps 10y ago
  In Chrome you can press "Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + D" and bookmark all open tabs into a folder. Then you can right click on the folder later to open all those tabs.
reactor 10y ago
Better use OneTab extension, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbolifaimnlloiipkdnihall?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...
reactor 10y ago
Better use OneTab extension, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbolifaimnlloiipkdnihall?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

by ausjke 10y ago

curiousgal 10y ago

120 tabs?! What for?!

setq 10y ago
I do this. It's a curse. I don't know why.
- Buge 10y ago
  I once had 1000 tabs open in firefox. I only found out when I accidentally clicked the x and it asked "are you sure you want to close 1000 tabs".
wiredfool 10y ago
Tabs are the new bookmarks.
- tdkl 10y ago
  Sadly they aren't bookmarks and then people moan about memory usage, when they should get a reality check instead.
  - to3m 10y ago
    I don't know if you're familiar with the ins and outs of writing computer programs, but it's actually often practical to make a program that does one thing do another instead. So in this case one obvious thing that could be done is to have a dormant-type (exact terminology TBC) tab. Such things would have an entry on the tab bar like a normal tab, but wouldn't actually have anything loaded until you clicked. Firefox already supports this sort of thing internally, it looks like, since when you reload a session that had a bunch of open tabs, it doesn't seem to load each tab's contents until you click on it. (Open such a thing with a particular shortcut, or by transforming an existing tab into a dormant one - obviously equivalent in terms of JS callbacks and so on to closing the window.) Other possibilities could include multiple types of tabs, and/or alternative UIs for lists of pages you like/pages you want to look at sometime soon.
    - curiousgal 10y ago
      >it's actually often practical to make a program that does one thing do another instead Like using Photoshop to abort a system shutdown if you forgot to commit.[0] 0.https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-greatest-software-misuses/answer/Sourabh-Singh-2 https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-greatest-software-misuses...
      - hugodahl 10y ago
        On Windows, using the built in notepad, you can block any shutdown by having an instance pen with any unsaved changes. Handy when Windows schedules a reboot and you've got your debugging session setup just right.
        Tempest1981 10y ago
        I read that Win10 will still force a scheduled reboot, even with unsaved documents: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3hb614/windows_10_automatic_updates_restarting_computer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3hb614/windows_10...
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    Now we know how people behave we can engineer the software to work well for them. Suspend the LRU tabs so they can be paged out, etc.
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    just curious if you've ever used a computer Pretty sure users aren't the ones that need a reality check, go fuck yourself.
    - grzm 10y ago
      go fuck yourself Please don't be uncivil on HN, regardless of the discussion.
      - PeCaN 10y ago
        go fuck yourself
    - sctb 10y ago
      We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the guidelines after we've asked you to stop. This account has posted a lot of decent comments, so we'd be very glad to unban it if you email hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll stop breaking the guidelines.
- sker 10y ago
  They're better. If I bookmark something with any service, chances of me ever checking that out again drop to nearly zero. Tabs, by virtue of being there bugging you, are bookmarks, to-do lists, and task reminders all in one.
  - truth_sentinell 10y ago
    No, they aren't. I don't know about you, but I can't have more than 20 tabs open and consciously be aware of the content. I can't think of people like above, having 120 tabs. It's probably a waste of time and resources. First because you can't possibly hold in your memory 120 tabs, thus you'll have to visit them or read the title to remind you why is it there on the first place. With bookmarks at least you can use the search bar... So it ends up being counterproductive.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - xorxornop 10y ago
      Naw, at least with me I seem to be able to by treating the tab ordering as a conceptual discovery ordering. That is, I remember what things I learned / researched prior to and following each tab. It's lossy, but because each has a unique relationship with its surrounding concepts there's plenty of opportunities for parity-like behaviour; redundancy. When researching a thing I'll open up some high level page about it, then do breadth-first searches of tab contents, opening up new tabs whenever I see something that looks interesting, has wider implications, or possibly has some weaker relationship to a thing with one or both of those properties and I think I might be able to traverse the concept graph this way to find it / them. So I end up with a sort of flat tree where it corresponds almost directly to my earlier thought graph which produced them. I can work with maybe 200 this way... But not more. Unless I open them in different windows - sometimes different browsers, actually, to help further differentiate/compartmentalise them (eg. I'll use this strategy for largely disparate topics). Then, well, I'm not sure where I top out, all I can say is I once crashed my box from out of memory (not running swap), and it's a 32GB box soooo... I dunno. There are likely many others that work this way. Perhaps it's not common, but I also feel that it's very unlikely unique!
spacehacker 10y ago
I personally use tabs like a desktop with all kinds of papers, documents and books flying around. Sort of like this: https://s15.postimg.org/dpq7mpmaz/messydesk.jpg https://s15.postimg.org/dpq7mpmaz/messydesk.jpg
- srathi 10y ago
  That seems like Einstein's desk. Is that correct? I remember seeing this picture before.
Theodores 10y ago
Sometimes I open 100 or so tabs to do repetitive stuff I cannot code, data entry work that won't be easily automated or needs the human touch, e.g. updating a product catalogue. On top of the 10-50 tabs open that gets to be a lot of heavy pages but makes for an efficient workflow. With hot keys and 'close all tabs to the right' I can quickly get through a lot of stuff that needs attention to detail and focus to get done. All I am saying is that there are situations when a lot of tabs is the best option given the circumstances, e.g. lots of data entry work.
Theodores 10y ago
Sometimes I open 100 or so tabs to do repetitive stuff I cannot code, data entry work that won't be easily automated or needs the human touch, e.g. updating a product catalogue. On top of the 10-50 tabs open that gets to be a lot of heavy pages but makes for an efficient workflow. With hot keys and 'close all tabs to the right' I can quickly get through a lot of stuff that needs attention to detail and focus to get done. All I am saying is that there are situations when a lot of tabs is the best option given the circumstances, e.g. lots of data entry work.

thejay 10y ago

I too keep a lot of tabs open. I use OneTab and The Great Suspender chrome extensions to also keep memory usage under control. They've been indispensable tools for the tab hoarders like me.

ausjke 10y ago
great, did not know this, I do use clutter-free extension all the time which avoids the same URL on multiple tabs.
ilaksh 10y ago
Exactly. Its hoarding. So eventually they will have to build in features to protect hoarders from themselves.

jcoffland 10y ago

This is mainly because Chrome allocates a process for each page whereas FF only allocates a thread. The important factor being that threads share an address space where processes are allocated their own and thus consume more memory. Separate processes are arguably more secure and of one process crashes it does not take down the whole browser but all this comes at a cost. This cost is very apparent with many tabs open.

robotresearcher 10y ago
> processes are allocated their own and thus consume more memory. Copy-on-write means this needn't be a large overhead. Only pages that change after forking are duplicated.
- mortehu 10y ago
  But the OS is committing to supplying memory for any writable pages you duplicated, because after all you might write to them. The OS doesn't know which pages you won't duplicate. Unless you set your vm.overcommit_memory sysctl variable to 1 (= never refuse malloc), duplicated writable pages are going to subtract from available memory, even if all copies are currently the same.
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    Sure. So your memory usage is reported as high but might not be actually high. Some sophistication is needed to interpret resource counts.
fulafel 10y ago
The primary security gain of sandboxing is about making it harder for web content to hijack your computer by exploiting security bugs. Many common types of bugs can be exploited to get remote code execution in browsers because of unsafe programming languages used (C/C++). Both Chrome and Firefox have multi-process sandboxes now, Firefox is a little behind and plans to enable multiple content processes next year. While Chrome's is more granular, it does share processes between web pages from the same domain so won't start a new one for quite every tab.

kilroy123 10y ago

I can't recommend this extension enough, The Great Suspender: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... It freezes your tab after a set amount of time, freeing up the memory for each tab.

raarts 10y ago
And it's also a huge battery saver.

nazri1 10y ago

My laptop has no ssd. This sluggishness brings back memories of linux trashing the swap partition when it ran out of memory back in the early 2000s. Quite understandable since back then most people don't have that much RAM (64Mb?). Nowadays I have 8Gb on my laptop and I run linux with swap disabled. The only disk trashing that I'm having nowadays is due to chrome, and it's definitely not due to swap but the effect is almost the same - at best the laptop is unusable for up to 30 seconds, at worst, I have to do a hard reboot because that's the only way to recover - I can't even switch to a new terminal to kill chrome. Attempts to log in via the tty console (Ctrl+Alt+F2) in order to kill chrome is futile. I could enter the username, but the password prompt took forever to appear. Most of the time it expires after 60 seconds. If I manage to enter the password, the shell prompt can take forever to appear. Nowadays I do a "killall chrome; sleep 2; killall chrome" whenever it starts to trash the disk and giving me the bad vibe.

kofejnik 10y ago
put chrome cache on a ram disk, helped me a lot last time I had a spinning hdd

weaksauce 10y ago

I made a simple firefox/chrome extension for people that horde tabs as temp bookmarks. You might find it useful to find tabs and quickly navigate to them by clicking on the link in the list. It's free and open source. The github page has a gif showing usage. You can also type cmd-shift-e or ctrl-shift-e to switch to it. Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiogfkaldbfphfdkpggjemaha https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog... Firefox Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ source code: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist Let me know if you find it useful or have any suggestions. (patches are awesome too)

sunnyps 10y ago
In Chrome you can press "Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + D" and bookmark all open tabs into a folder. Then you can right click on the folder later to open all those tabs.

reactor 10y ago

Better use OneTab extension, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbolifaimnlloiipkdnihall?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

reactor 10y ago

Better use OneTab extension, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbolifaimnlloiipkdnihall?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...