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Gmail using too much RAM: 1-2GB per tab in Safari
- gorbachev 3y agoApple fanboy bootlicking actively on that thread. What a joke.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoYou can address that by using the HTML UI, which is better in pretty much every possible way than the default UI. In unrelated news, they're disabling the HTML UI soon.
- dvh 3y agoGoogle will discontinue the basic HTML version of Gmail starting January 2024. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en
- dvfjsdhgfv 3y agoThis would mean on a newest entry-level Mac Book Pro you can open maximum 8 Gmail tabs in Safari until it starts swapping out.
- askonomm 3y agoNot true. If MacOS lacks physical RAM, it will get extra from swap on SSD, and will continue to function just fine.
- dvfjsdhgfv 3y agoWell, of course all modern OS-es use swap when they don't have enough memory. But if it means they "function just fine", why Apple doesn't sell their entry level with just 4 GB if it really makes no difference?
- mort96 3y agoWell the comment you're responding to did say "until it starts swapping out". Was that added after you wrote your comment?
- bestham 3y agoUntil you wear out your TLC / QLC NAND chips. Then the whole computer is e-waste.
- Woshiwuja 3y agoi love how they ask if it is impacting performance lol.
- palmfacehn 3y ago>You'll need to alter your usage habits or get a new, or newer, computer with specs and capabilities that suit your need. Quint: Brody?! Start that chum line again, will ya?! Martin: Let Hooper take a turn. Quint: Hooper drives the boat, chief. Stop playin' with yerself Hooper; slow ahead, if you please. Martin: You heard him, slow ahead! -- Slow ahead! I can go slow ahead! C'mon down and chum some of this shit! -- You're gonna need a bigger boat. Quint: Shut off that engine. Hooper: That's a twenty footer! Quint: Twenty five! And three tons of him! Martin: You're gonna need a bigger boat, right? http://www.its.caltech.edu/~squires/jaws_script.html http://www.its.caltech.edu/~squires/jaws_script.html
- Woshiwuja 3y ago>Micromanaging your Mac is a fruitless venture. Use your Mac and enjoy it. When an actual problem arises, this is the place to come. Uhm i think it is an actual problem bro
- lemak 3y agothey hate it when you know what GB is.
- jstummbillig 3y agoFor the life of me, I can not figure out how the 8GB models work for Apple. To be sure, I am near certain they do, I just don't understand how. I get that they can sell an upgrade here but it's so obvious of a bottleneck that risks impacting the most basic experience of normies, who do not even wanna know what RAM is, which will just worsen the impression that could easily be fixed at a production premium of, what, $20? Why would Apple do that? Your entire product feels bad, when you run out of RAM. It seems so off.
- camhart 3y agoThe bigger cost could be all the customers that would pick the lower tier model if it had sufficient ram, instead of the higher tier.
- dvfjsdhgfv 3y agoYeah, sometimes I think they designed it this way so that people would not buy the entry level MBP. I remember when I bought one in 2019, after some time it would complain it cannot update Xcode because of lack of space. The point is, Xcode was the only additional app installed on this MBP. So yeah, it might be their strategy to give an illusion of choice with offering unusable cheaper options while for everything decent you need to pay disproportionately more.
- lproven 3y agoNo, it's because having on-die RAM leads to a lot of defective dies that have to be thrown away. So perhaps some can be salvaged by disabling half of the RAM because a few bytes don't work and thus can be sold as 8GB units.
- jhy 3y agoI run an 8GB M1 as my main desktop for Java development and it's 70% fine. I needed a replacement for my previous PC during covid/cpu shortages and in AU, there were no 16GB versions available. (So the upsell argument is not the only part of the story). For running Chrome, IntelliJ, Spotify, Terminal, fuzz tests etc at once, it's fine. But running YourKit profiling or Steam etc, everything else swaps out and grinds. So: it's amazing to me that you can do so much with just 8GB,and egregious that Apple can't put in a couple of slots for an extension.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoNo big deal, just buy a second MacBook Pro for reading email.
- walteweiss 3y agoAnd another one for writing them as well!
- baz00 3y agoThe trick here is to use Mail.app instead. It talks to gmail. Despite there being something obviously wrong here, web browser and web apps are terribly inefficient resource hogs compared to a lot of native stuff. Edit: and electron crap.
- X-Cubed 3y agoA number of the Gmail features are unique to the web app, not standard email filters so while Mail.app will get you the core features you'll still need the ability to run the web app from time to time (eg: updating mail filters)
- Jolter 3y agoMail.app doesn’t really work for me. The search function is crap, and it’s the main strength of Gmail. Apart from search, it work OK, I guess. That said, I run an 8GB MacBook Air and have never experienced any problem with gmail in Safari.
- Angostura 3y agoInteresting, where does search on Mail fail for you? I’ve always found it extraordinarily good
- cassianoleal 3y agoSo have I. And incredibly snappy as well.
- jiqiren 3y agoexactly. I have 12GB of gmail all synced with mail.app and it's using ~540MB ram.
- laurencerowe 3y agoI finally upgraded to Sonoma and freed up about 20GB of disk space (I’m close to my 512GB capacity) by switching to gmail as a PWA. I much prefer gmail to mail.app but was always losing it in my many open tabs, so the PWA is perfect.
- sp0ck 3y agoI'm pretty sure JavaScript has significant impact on climate change and global warming ..
- okokwhatever 3y agoThe irony of your comment makes you evil, funny but evil XD
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thefz 3y agoFirefox reports 275MB on Ubuntu.
- palmfacehn 3y ago4.22mb for basic HTML view in Firefox
- Jolter 3y agoIf you’re using basic HTML, I’d argue that you’re not getting full value out of Gmail. Better to run Thunderbird locally in that case.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoIn my experience, the HTML view is higher-value than the default. It removes the artificial division of your email into three secretly determined categories, it removes the delays involved in opening a message, it won't hang your computer... the only downside is that gchat doesn't work, though I don't actually know whether that still exists or not. What value do we supposedly get from the weird Javascript monstrosity?
- seba_dos1 3y agoSame here. It's cleaner, faster and more reliable, which is something that cannot even be said about Gmail's IMAP interface. The removal of basic HTML view may turn out to be the last straw to make me finally migrate out of Gmail.
- rasz 3y agoDont worry, Google is removing basic HTML view in 47 days.
- phendrenad2 3y agoThis must be a mistaken measurement. How would GMail take up 1GB of RAM? Maybe the user has some GMail addons that leak memory or load huge word dictionaries or something.
- i1856511 3y agoIt's not false, I have this same problem right now. I have mail.google.com opened in a Safari tab. When the tab is open and In Activity Monitor, I see: Memory 1.2 GB, Real Memory 500 MB, VM Compressed 260 MB. When I switch away focus, Memory drops to 900 MB. The Gmail web app is a RAM hog in Safari.
- the_cramer 3y agoYou'd think that the progression in computer technology brings you faster apps that need less ressources. But instead we tend to waste them in ever growing tech stacks. Browsers are nearly OSes now, apps are running in a container, emulating a browser. All in the name of platform independence. I wonder what a system with native bare metal apps would look like today and how far you can push down the hardware requirements while still having a snappy experience in - let's say - a basic office job (mails, sheets, documents, browsing) But "You bought too little RAM to read mails" is simply hilarious. Yes, the user can install mail clients, but not everybody is tech savvy enough for that.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago"You'd think that the progression in computer technology brings you faster apps that need less ressources." And yet you would be wrong. Because after Microsoft we could no longer trust software develepers, another option is to _not change_ the software when upgrading the hardware, thereby enjoying the benefits of the new hardware. For example, I run software written in the "distant" past on today's hardware, e.g., using NetBSD as the OS. I do not use containers. I do not use graphics. It's "native bare metal". IMHO, it's far better than today's "apps". Faster and more resilient. I can fully separate code from data. IMO, I get more of the benefits of the new hardware due to relatively _less resource consumption_, even though the older software rarely can make use of every new hardware feature. Early next year Google says it is not going to let people use HTML mode (no Javascript) in Gmail anymore. This is still easily accessed by changing "/u/0/u/" in the URL to "/u/0/h/". Previously, Google tried to prevent people from using unpopular browsers to access Gmail. As a text-only browser user I needed a workaround. With help from a localhost forward proxy I am still able to use a text-only browser. Whether this new change will absolutely stop people from avoiding Javascript remains to be seen.
- hannob 3y ago> I wonder what a system with native bare metal apps would look like today and how far you can push down the hardware requirements while still having a snappy experience in - let's say - a basic office job (mails, sheets, documents, browsing) I mean it's not that you can't have that. Get a Linux desktop with one of the less bloated desktop environments like lxqt or xfce, there's still a variety of e-mail applications available, libreoffice does the basic office application tasks. It's more or less what I'm doing. Not saying it's perfect, there's certainly a lot that could be improved (without sacrificing performance), e.g. by better integration of the various parts. But you absolutely can have a basic Desktop system with great performance on modern hardware. The situation where you end up still having to deal with the sluggishness of modern software is when you want to interact with the tools the world out there uses. Often that means "yet another slow electron app".
- okokwhatever 3y agoConsumption of memory for this simple page in Chrome for Windows is 150 MB for me. Comparing the functionalities of both web-apps it looks like HN wastes more resources than Gmail.
- palmfacehn 3y agoI see 2.64mb in Firefox + Linux
- okokwhatever 3y agoAmazing difference. Maybe the use of addons in chrome increments the memory consumption per tab? interesting
- heavyset_go 3y agoIt's the same deal with most of the big tech companies' web apps. Facebook, Twitter, etc all seem to somehow not only take up gigabytes of memory, but waste CPU cycles even when their pages are in the background. Add that to every app that insists on being bundled into a browser via Electron, and you'll quickly have memory eaten up. Blows my mind that premium products like Macs, and even some premium business laptop lines, are still shipping with 8GB of memory.
- nirui 3y agoOff topic, but: > Micromanaging your Mac is a fruitless venture. Use your Mac and enjoy it... I run...just fine > Apple is right. You bought too little RAM and it can't be changed now. You'll need to alter your usage habits or get a new, or newer, computer I mean.... did I just witnessed an "Apple fan boy" everybody talked about? Not name calling obviously, just to trying to do some calibration on myself.
- dreamcompiler 3y agoThe problem is twofold: Operating systems that don't penalize apps for being resource hogs, and browsers that allow any tab but the frontmost one to consume significant amounts of CPU or memory. In other words, no Javascript program should be allowed to DOS your machine. It's within the power of the browser and the OS to restrict this; they just choose not to.
- seec 3y agoThe funniest thing is the forum commenter gaslighting the poor dude, ala "you are using it wrong fashion". There are 2 solutions to his problem: - switch web browser (chrome is going to perform better with Gmail, guaranteed) and use fewer apps at once. It's not so much of a solution but more of a compromise. - get more RAM and because those are soldered in MBPs since 2016, it really means change computer. People arguing about apps using too much RAM or whatever are just sad Apple apologists. It's a non-issue in the PC world because you have plenty of choices where RAM is not soldered or upgrading the soldered RAM doesn't cost an arm and leg like Apple does. So, you just do it and if you didn't you can only blame yourself for being stingy by trying to save 50-100 bucks at best. Now some would say it will benefit Apple because he is likely to get a newer, better MBP. But if I were in his situation, I would rethink spending so much money on a lackluster computer. Which is exactly what he did in another comments. The exodus is well on its way...