5 ms·

My 100+ tabs consuming 12GB of RAM says otherwise...

by ranger_danger 3y ago

ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
I upgraded from 16gb to 32gb of RAM expressly because of firefox.
- neglesaks 3y ago
  And the saying used to be that Chrome was the chief RAM gobbler of most users' PCs. :)
  - kimixa 3y ago
    A fully rendered modern webpage is BIG - no matter what engine rendered it. IIRC both current big engines drop the rendered state in the background under memory pressure, as it's pretty much the only way of dealing with it.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Chrome is actually pretty good at dehydrating and rehydrating tabs on demand these days, at least in my experience.
lxgr 3y ago
Same here. What are the chances of that Mozilla rep actually using Chrome (which actually does auto-unload tabs these days)?
shock 3y ago
That's because of the Javascript running on them. If I have a dozen youtube tabs that are not suspended my FF becomes very janky and if I look in FF task manager, sure enough, they're consuming lots of CPU. I suspend them and FF becomes snappier again.
- ranger_danger 3y ago
  > suspend Right, but the article says nothing about suspending and seems to strongly suggest that tabs take "no ram at all" by default, which is just plain false, unless I'm misunderstanding something. I don't even see a way to suspend tabs without a separate extension.
  - techjamie 3y ago
    There is also an unfair comparison made in the article. > A quick PCMag test shows that 10 Chrome tabs on a Windows 11 PC with 32GB of RAM and 2TB of NVMe SSD storage take up over 2,000MB, or 12.5% of PC memory, so there's still room for improvement (Hazel's massive Firefox session file is just 70MB). Taking up nearly 2GB of RAM for 10 tabs sucks, but they seem to be comparing the size of the session on disk to the resident size of the loaded browser in memory, of course the memory footprint is going to blow it away.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    well i have 4600 tabs, 13 windows, 18 tab groups and 130 firefox processes. htop shows me that while each browser process has about 3GB of virtual memory, all of them barely register any real memory use. so as far as i can tell, tabs do not use any memory.
    - ranger_danger 3y ago
      Ok but those tabs would have to be suspended for them to not use "any" memory.
      - em-bee 3y ago
        right, most tabs are suspended. i also use an extension that automatically suspends inactive tabs, so i don't have more than 20 or 30 tabs that are not suspended.
  - utensil4778 3y ago
    Close Firefox then restore your session. Until you switch to a tab, it stays unloaded and consumes nearly no resources. The tab does stay resident in memory until you restart again, or otherwise suspend it.

My 100+ tabs consuming 12GB of RAM says otherwise...

ThrowawayTestr 3y ago

I upgraded from 16gb to 32gb of RAM expressly because of firefox.

neglesaks 3y ago
And the saying used to be that Chrome was the chief RAM gobbler of most users' PCs. :)
- kimixa 3y ago
  A fully rendered modern webpage is BIG - no matter what engine rendered it. IIRC both current big engines drop the rendered state in the background under memory pressure, as it's pretty much the only way of dealing with it.
- lxgr 3y ago
  Chrome is actually pretty good at dehydrating and rehydrating tabs on demand these days, at least in my experience.

lxgr 3y ago

Same here. What are the chances of that Mozilla rep actually using Chrome (which actually does auto-unload tabs these days)?

shock 3y ago

That's because of the Javascript running on them. If I have a dozen youtube tabs that are not suspended my FF becomes very janky and if I look in FF task manager, sure enough, they're consuming lots of CPU. I suspend them and FF becomes snappier again.

ranger_danger 3y ago
> suspend Right, but the article says nothing about suspending and seems to strongly suggest that tabs take "no ram at all" by default, which is just plain false, unless I'm misunderstanding something. I don't even see a way to suspend tabs without a separate extension.
- techjamie 3y ago
  There is also an unfair comparison made in the article. > A quick PCMag test shows that 10 Chrome tabs on a Windows 11 PC with 32GB of RAM and 2TB of NVMe SSD storage take up over 2,000MB, or 12.5% of PC memory, so there's still room for improvement (Hazel's massive Firefox session file is just 70MB). Taking up nearly 2GB of RAM for 10 tabs sucks, but they seem to be comparing the size of the session on disk to the resident size of the loaded browser in memory, of course the memory footprint is going to blow it away.
- em-bee 3y ago
  well i have 4600 tabs, 13 windows, 18 tab groups and 130 firefox processes. htop shows me that while each browser process has about 3GB of virtual memory, all of them barely register any real memory use. so as far as i can tell, tabs do not use any memory.
  - ranger_danger 3y ago
    Ok but those tabs would have to be suspended for them to not use "any" memory.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      right, most tabs are suspended. i also use an extension that automatically suspends inactive tabs, so i don't have more than 20 or 30 tabs that are not suspended.
- utensil4778 3y ago
  Close Firefox then restore your session. Until you switch to a tab, it stays unloaded and consumes nearly no resources. The tab does stay resident in memory until you restart again, or otherwise suspend it.