4 ms·

AFAIK, there is still a memory barrier in chrome which is set to 4gb per tab.

abxytg 3y ago
I hate it so much. So arbitrary and capricious. I would say this is currently the number one blocker for the web as a serious platform. And they're doing it on purpose.
- vicktorium 3y ago
  what apps can't run on 4GB? games? 3D? Editing? have you tried forking chrome and increasing this limit?
  - KeplerBoy 3y ago
    Some AI apps. You can't really load a capable LLM in 4 GB. Or does this limit not apply when dealing with WASM and WebGPU?
  - paulgb 3y ago
    Video editors are a big one. I've heard of people crashing a browser tab with Figma as well. For data exploration tools it's very easy to want to use 4GB+ of memory. I found the limit cumbersome while working on financial tools. It usually comes up in internal tools where you reliably have a fast internet connection; it's harder to reach the limit for public-facing tools because there the slowness of sending 4GB+ to the browser is the more limiting factor. The annoying part isn't just that the limit is there, but that you can't really handle it gracefully as the developer -- when the browser decides you've hit the limit, it may just replace the page with an error message.
    - 10000truths 3y ago
      For a video editor, only a small portion of the video needs to be in memory at any given time. The rest can be squirreled away in an IndexedDB store, which has no hard size limits on most browsers.
  - jjcm 3y ago
    It's one of our big barriers over at Figma. Creative tools in general hit this limit pretty quickly. For context, I was a very heavy user of Photoshop back in the day. Even a decade ago I remember hitting 20GB of active memory use for Photoshop. Things get really big really quick, especially when you're storing uncompressed versions of raster elements in memory. To frame things in a different way, 4GB is 22 seconds of 1080p video if you're loading the raw frames into memory.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  I guess the policy is that tabs can use 100% of the available resources on low end devices, but only 10% of the available resources on high end devices.
  - skybrian 3y ago
    I think the desktop policy might be better. In the tablets I've used, tabs sometimes get killed when I switch tabs and visit another website with a lot of ads. It's an annoying way to lose work in an unsubmitted form. It doesn't seem to happen for desktop.
    - NavinF 3y ago
      That's because most (all?) phones don't swap to a pagefile whereas every desktop OS has swap enabled by default. The only practical solution is to buy a phone with more memory. IMO 6GB is the bare minimum in 2024
      - mkesper 3y ago
        No, just use an ad blocker and save the environment from more waste.
        NavinF 3y ago
        Ad blockers certainly shave off a few MBs, but in my experience the vast majority of RAM usage is not caused by ads. Unlike first party content, ads are automatically benchmarked by ad exchanges and penalized for using too much resources. I also don't think a 200gram phone is the kind of waste that we should be concerned about. Think bigger
        PoignardAzur 3y ago
        > I also don't think a 200gram phone is the kind of waste that we should be concerned about. Think bigger A lot of raw ore is processed to get those 200 grams in your hand. That said, a quick search tells me the carbon footprint of producing a phone is around 55kg, which is about 320km of car travel; it's not trivial, but it's not as much of a bottleneck I thought it might be.
- amelius 3y ago
  4GB ought to be enough for anybody.
jsheard 3y ago
At least on desktop you generally know where the line is, on mobile there's a mystery limit you're not allowed to cross, and you're also not allowed to know where the line is until you reach it, which might gracefully throw an error or might result in your tab being force-killed, and you're not allowed to know which of those will happen either.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Mobile Safari just has a fixed limit of 500 tabs
  - Me1000 3y ago
    If you switch to private browsing mode you can get an extra 500 tabs. :)
    - wlesieutre 3y ago
      What about other tab groups?
  - paulgb 3y ago
    This is a user-facing limit; jsheard is talking about how as an app developer you don't know whether your app is below the limit or whether the next allocation will kill the browser tab.
- echelon 3y ago
  I'm building a list of "second class citizen" mobile web issues for Android and Apple. I wasn't aware of this one! Do you know of anything else like this?
  - jsheard 3y ago
    https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1397 https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1397 > Currently allocating more than ~300MB of memory is not reliable on Chrome on Android without resorting to Chrome-specific workarounds, nor in Safari on iOS. That's about allocating CPU memory but the GPU memory situation is similar. The specs don't want to reveal information about how much memory you're allowed to use because it could be used for fingerprinting, but that means that it's practically impossible to build reliable applications which use (or can optionally use) a lot of memory. Every allocation you make past a few hundred MB risks blowing up the app immediately, or putting it into the danger zone where it's the first in line to get killed when running in the background, either way without any warning or last-chance opportunity to release memory to avert getting killed.
FL33TW00D 3y ago
This is a 7B parameter model at int4, lots to play with!
jmayes 3y ago
Hello there, I am one of the authors of the piece. Fun fact just for the lols we have tried running a 1.3B parameter unoptimized TensorFlow.js model in this system just to see if it would work (could be much more memory efficient with tweaks), and it does. It uses about 6GB RAM and 14GB VRAM when using V100 GPU on Colab (15GB VRAM limit) but runs pretty fast otherwise once the initial load is complete! Obviously plenty of room to make this use much less memory in the future - we just wanted to check we could run such things as a test for now.

I hate it so much. So arbitrary and capricious. I would say this is currently the number one blocker for the web as a serious platform. And they're doing it on purpose.

vicktorium 3y ago
what apps can't run on 4GB? games? 3D? Editing? have you tried forking chrome and increasing this limit?
- KeplerBoy 3y ago
  Some AI apps. You can't really load a capable LLM in 4 GB. Or does this limit not apply when dealing with WASM and WebGPU?
- paulgb 3y ago
  Video editors are a big one. I've heard of people crashing a browser tab with Figma as well. For data exploration tools it's very easy to want to use 4GB+ of memory. I found the limit cumbersome while working on financial tools. It usually comes up in internal tools where you reliably have a fast internet connection; it's harder to reach the limit for public-facing tools because there the slowness of sending 4GB+ to the browser is the more limiting factor. The annoying part isn't just that the limit is there, but that you can't really handle it gracefully as the developer -- when the browser decides you've hit the limit, it may just replace the page with an error message.
  - 10000truths 3y ago
    For a video editor, only a small portion of the video needs to be in memory at any given time. The rest can be squirreled away in an IndexedDB store, which has no hard size limits on most browsers.
- jjcm 3y ago
  It's one of our big barriers over at Figma. Creative tools in general hit this limit pretty quickly. For context, I was a very heavy user of Photoshop back in the day. Even a decade ago I remember hitting 20GB of active memory use for Photoshop. Things get really big really quick, especially when you're storing uncompressed versions of raster elements in memory. To frame things in a different way, 4GB is 22 seconds of 1080p video if you're loading the raw frames into memory.
whatshisface 3y ago
I guess the policy is that tabs can use 100% of the available resources on low end devices, but only 10% of the available resources on high end devices.
- skybrian 3y ago
  I think the desktop policy might be better. In the tablets I've used, tabs sometimes get killed when I switch tabs and visit another website with a lot of ads. It's an annoying way to lose work in an unsubmitted form. It doesn't seem to happen for desktop.
  - NavinF 3y ago
    That's because most (all?) phones don't swap to a pagefile whereas every desktop OS has swap enabled by default. The only practical solution is to buy a phone with more memory. IMO 6GB is the bare minimum in 2024
    - mkesper 3y ago
      No, just use an ad blocker and save the environment from more waste.
      - NavinF 3y ago
        Ad blockers certainly shave off a few MBs, but in my experience the vast majority of RAM usage is not caused by ads. Unlike first party content, ads are automatically benchmarked by ad exchanges and penalized for using too much resources. I also don't think a 200gram phone is the kind of waste that we should be concerned about. Think bigger
        PoignardAzur 3y ago
        > I also don't think a 200gram phone is the kind of waste that we should be concerned about. Think bigger A lot of raw ore is processed to get those 200 grams in your hand. That said, a quick search tells me the carbon footprint of producing a phone is around 55kg, which is about 320km of car travel; it's not trivial, but it's not as much of a bottleneck I thought it might be.
amelius 3y ago
4GB ought to be enough for anybody.

jsheard 3y ago

At least on desktop you generally know where the line is, on mobile there's a mystery limit you're not allowed to cross, and you're also not allowed to know where the line is until you reach it, which might gracefully throw an error or might result in your tab being force-killed, and you're not allowed to know which of those will happen either.

fragmede 3y ago
Mobile Safari just has a fixed limit of 500 tabs
- Me1000 3y ago
  If you switch to private browsing mode you can get an extra 500 tabs. :)
  - wlesieutre 3y ago
    What about other tab groups?
- paulgb 3y ago
  This is a user-facing limit; jsheard is talking about how as an app developer you don't know whether your app is below the limit or whether the next allocation will kill the browser tab.
echelon 3y ago
I'm building a list of "second class citizen" mobile web issues for Android and Apple. I wasn't aware of this one! Do you know of anything else like this?
- jsheard 3y ago
  https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1397 https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1397 > Currently allocating more than ~300MB of memory is not reliable on Chrome on Android without resorting to Chrome-specific workarounds, nor in Safari on iOS. That's about allocating CPU memory but the GPU memory situation is similar. The specs don't want to reveal information about how much memory you're allowed to use because it could be used for fingerprinting, but that means that it's practically impossible to build reliable applications which use (or can optionally use) a lot of memory. Every allocation you make past a few hundred MB risks blowing up the app immediately, or putting it into the danger zone where it's the first in line to get killed when running in the background, either way without any warning or last-chance opportunity to release memory to avert getting killed.

FL33TW00D 3y ago

This is a 7B parameter model at int4, lots to play with!

jmayes 3y ago

Hello there, I am one of the authors of the piece. Fun fact just for the lols we have tried running a 1.3B parameter unoptimized TensorFlow.js model in this system just to see if it would work (could be much more memory efficient with tweaks), and it does. It uses about 6GB RAM and 14GB VRAM when using V100 GPU on Colab (15GB VRAM limit) but runs pretty fast otherwise once the initial load is complete! Obviously plenty of room to make this use much less memory in the future - we just wanted to check we could run such things as a test for now.