7 ms·

The amount of bloat in modern websites always amazed me. I remember the first computer I ever had, a hand me down from my parents with 512MB of ram and a single

The amount of bloat in modern websites always amazed me. I remember the first computer I ever had, a hand me down from my parents with 512MB of ram and a single core 1.6GHz cpu (yes I'm a zoomer and wasn't even born in the good ole days of dialup internet and Windows 95) and all websites I visited ran just fine. I could open many browser tabs and do all the things one normally does in a website. The only main difference maybe is that video playback nowadays is done at much higher resolutions and bitrate. And web apps were a very new (or maybe even non-existent) concept. But still, nowadays I see my web browser using 1GB+ of memory with a few tabs open containing some newspaper articles and perhaps a couple other misc non media heavy websites. This is madness. When not using an ad blocker, the amount of data that a regular website loads that's not relevant for what you need to read (so no text and images included) is huge. I can understand why some complex web apps like Google Docs or whatever the cloud version of MS Office is called may be quite more resource intensive than a magazine article, but there is no reason why a newspaper or cooking recipe site should use memory in the hundreds of megabytes, when the useful content itself that the reader cares about is maybe (with images included) a couple megabytes in total.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> When not using an ad blocker why would any sane person ever do this? oh right, mobile. so let me ask a different way: why would any sane person ever browse the web on any platform that does not have effective ad blocking?
- lupire 5y ago
  Mobile.
  - meowster 5y ago
    Friends don't let friends use anything but FireFox with uBlock Origin, on Android... Sorry iPhone users :-/
    - prophesi 5y ago
      On iPhone, I use Wipr which handles blocking the majority of ads.
      - artificial 5y ago
        Also an option is NextDNS, Raspberry Pi without the hassle. A combination of 1Blocker and NextDNS works pretty decent.
- eric__cartman 5y ago
  My mom's first response after I deployed AdGuard Home in her network was "I don't know what you did but my phone feels faster" lol
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  I don't mind ads, only have an issue with performance and tracking. My browsing habits are such that very occasionally I stumble upon a website full of ads and it's startling.
john-doe 5y ago
An empty Google Docs document (read-only) is 6.5MB, making 187 requests…
jyounker 5y ago
> a hand me down from my parents with 512MB of ram and a single core 1.6GHz cpu Wow. I'm feeling old. My first computer ran at 1MHz with 16K of memory. :)
dale_glass 5y ago
The memory requirements for graphics changed dramatically. A screen at 1024x768, 16 bit color is 1.5 MB. A screen at 3840x2160, 24 bit color is 24 MB. 32 MB if using 32 bit color. Add to it that graphics became more plentiful with increased bandwidth, and low color GIFs are out of fashion, and you very easily see the memory usage grow by several times just from that fact alone. Older operating systems also didn't have a compositor. They told the application: "this part of your window has just been damaged by the user dragging another window over it, redraw it". Modern operating systems use a compositor. Every window is rendered in memory then composed as needed. This makes for a much nicer experience, but the memory cost of that is quite significant. Take a webpage, and just give the mouse wheel a good spin. It should render lightning fast, which probably means the browser has a good chunk if not all of the page pre-rendered and ready to put on the screen in a few milliseconds. This also is going to take a lot of memory.
- remram 5y ago
  32 MB is nothing. Unless you have hundreds of open windows this does not account for gigabytes of memory usage from the browser.
  - dale_glass 5y ago
    Point is, as resolutions and color depth increased, the amount of memory needed for graphics grew by several times. So a switch from 512MB being enough to several GB being needed is almost unavoidable on account of that alone.
    - throwaway3699 5y ago
      That all happens on the GPU. Do task managers show memory for both?
      - dale_glass 5y ago
        What do you mean, "on the GPU"? Where do you think the GPU gets the textures? I'm not familiar with DirectX, but OpenGL manages textures invisibly behind the developer's back, to the point that it's difficult for a developer to find out how much VRAM there is. OpenGL wants to invisibly manage VRAM on its own, which means that every texture you have exists at least twice: Once in RAM, and once in VRAM. And very possibly 3 times, if the application keeps the original texture data in its own buffer for a bunch of reasons. So when you look at google.com, that Google logo probably exists in memory at least 3 times: probably as a RGB bitmap (the actual image object the browser works with), in RAM managed by the graphics driver (in whatever format the graphics card likes best), and then on the card's VRAM possibly. It could be more, like if the browser can apply some sort of color correction or other transformation and therefore keeps both the original and retouched version. The original PNG is also probably in the cache, and there exists the possibility of extra copies because some particular part of the system needs images to be in some specific format. Graphics are memory hungry, and it adds up fast. The nice thing about this is that your GUI doesn't get a whole bunch of horrible artifacts if you hook up a 4K monitor to a laptop that allocates 128MB VRAM to graphics. The 3D rendering layer simply makes do with what VRAM there is by constantly copying stuff from RAM as needed, with the applications not noticing anything. The bad thing is that this convenience has a cost in RAM. But really, for the better. Can you imagine the pain it would be to program a GUI if every single application had to allocate VRAM for itself and could break the system by exhausting it?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
perl4ever 5y ago
The thing I hate most about the modern web experience is something else - somehow, it seems to have become fairly standard to reflow content between a tap and when it registers, but not to use the coordinates from before the reflow. This seems like such an obvious and elementary bug that I have wondered if I'm missing something. Like, maybe it's deliberately done to increase the number of accidental clicks on ads. Then again, maybe it's just a side effect of everything being threaded and asynchronous these days.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

> When not using an ad blocker why would any sane person ever do this? oh right, mobile. so let me ask a different way: why would any sane person ever browse the web on any platform that does not have effective ad blocking?

lupire 5y ago
Mobile.
- meowster 5y ago
  Friends don't let friends use anything but FireFox with uBlock Origin, on Android... Sorry iPhone users :-/
  - prophesi 5y ago
    On iPhone, I use Wipr which handles blocking the majority of ads.
    - artificial 5y ago
      Also an option is NextDNS, Raspberry Pi without the hassle. A combination of 1Blocker and NextDNS works pretty decent.
eric__cartman 5y ago
My mom's first response after I deployed AdGuard Home in her network was "I don't know what you did but my phone feels faster" lol
throwaway3699 5y ago
I don't mind ads, only have an issue with performance and tracking. My browsing habits are such that very occasionally I stumble upon a website full of ads and it's startling.

john-doe 5y ago

An empty Google Docs document (read-only) is 6.5MB, making 187 requests…

jyounker 5y ago

> a hand me down from my parents with 512MB of ram and a single core 1.6GHz cpu Wow. I'm feeling old. My first computer ran at 1MHz with 16K of memory. :)

dale_glass 5y ago

The memory requirements for graphics changed dramatically. A screen at 1024x768, 16 bit color is 1.5 MB. A screen at 3840x2160, 24 bit color is 24 MB. 32 MB if using 32 bit color. Add to it that graphics became more plentiful with increased bandwidth, and low color GIFs are out of fashion, and you very easily see the memory usage grow by several times just from that fact alone. Older operating systems also didn't have a compositor. They told the application: "this part of your window has just been damaged by the user dragging another window over it, redraw it". Modern operating systems use a compositor. Every window is rendered in memory then composed as needed. This makes for a much nicer experience, but the memory cost of that is quite significant. Take a webpage, and just give the mouse wheel a good spin. It should render lightning fast, which probably means the browser has a good chunk if not all of the page pre-rendered and ready to put on the screen in a few milliseconds. This also is going to take a lot of memory.

remram 5y ago
32 MB is nothing. Unless you have hundreds of open windows this does not account for gigabytes of memory usage from the browser.
- dale_glass 5y ago
  Point is, as resolutions and color depth increased, the amount of memory needed for graphics grew by several times. So a switch from 512MB being enough to several GB being needed is almost unavoidable on account of that alone.
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    That all happens on the GPU. Do task managers show memory for both?
    - dale_glass 5y ago
      What do you mean, "on the GPU"? Where do you think the GPU gets the textures? I'm not familiar with DirectX, but OpenGL manages textures invisibly behind the developer's back, to the point that it's difficult for a developer to find out how much VRAM there is. OpenGL wants to invisibly manage VRAM on its own, which means that every texture you have exists at least twice: Once in RAM, and once in VRAM. And very possibly 3 times, if the application keeps the original texture data in its own buffer for a bunch of reasons. So when you look at google.com, that Google logo probably exists in memory at least 3 times: probably as a RGB bitmap (the actual image object the browser works with), in RAM managed by the graphics driver (in whatever format the graphics card likes best), and then on the card's VRAM possibly. It could be more, like if the browser can apply some sort of color correction or other transformation and therefore keeps both the original and retouched version. The original PNG is also probably in the cache, and there exists the possibility of extra copies because some particular part of the system needs images to be in some specific format. Graphics are memory hungry, and it adds up fast. The nice thing about this is that your GUI doesn't get a whole bunch of horrible artifacts if you hook up a 4K monitor to a laptop that allocates 128MB VRAM to graphics. The 3D rendering layer simply makes do with what VRAM there is by constantly copying stuff from RAM as needed, with the applications not noticing anything. The bad thing is that this convenience has a cost in RAM. But really, for the better. Can you imagine the pain it would be to program a GUI if every single application had to allocate VRAM for itself and could break the system by exhausting it?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

perl4ever 5y ago

The thing I hate most about the modern web experience is something else - somehow, it seems to have become fairly standard to reflow content between a tap and when it registers, but not to use the coordinates from before the reflow. This seems like such an obvious and elementary bug that I have wondered if I'm missing something. Like, maybe it's deliberately done to increase the number of accidental clicks on ads. Then again, maybe it's just a side effect of everything being threaded and asynchronous these days.