Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

one-tab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–298 of 298 posts

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#291

Post by vostrocity »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #254
simonster wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Firefox tab bar is naturally more usable than the Chrome tab bar with large numbers of tabs because it scrolls rather than trying to fit them all in the bar. (I sometimes wonder whether squeezing tabs to the point of absurdity was actually a conscious decision by the Chrome developers to limit the number of tabs people can open and thus memory use.) There are a lot of Firefox extensions that add additional tools…

Actually I usually set firefox to squeeze tabs. I love it. As long as the favicon is visible it works fine. Hiding the favicon in small tabs is the real sin of chrome.

I agree. I'm a tab hoarder with hundreds of tabs open in Chrome. I never do that with Firefox's scrolling tabs because I remember where things are based on their place among the other tabs. Firefox doing a min-width on each tab and hiding the rest makes it impossible to find where that other page I looked at 5 minutes ago went.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#292

Post by vostrocity »

k3n wrote: post #214
chongli wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabs have replaced bookmarks as the means of saving stuff for later. Why is that? Because bookmarks require a lot more mental effort to organize and take more effort to delete when you're done with them. Bookmarks also take a lot longer to load than a tab (which is usually loaded already).

Very good point, and touches on a potential piece I'd like to write sometime. Used to, bookmarks were like a collection of good books -- easily filed away, organized, and still as good when you opened them a year later as when you last touched them. But not anymore. They change. There's tons of them. And organization sucks, though FF isn't as bad as Chrome and IE, but the general paradigm of shortcuts needs to be re-…

I agree. I regularly have hundreds of tabs open in Chrome, and while I do regularly save things to Chrome bookmarks, I treat it more as a place where I can put something that I won't look at again but there's a 1% chance I'll desperately need to find it at some point in the future and won't be able to find it by Googling.

Also interesting that Chrome never added an option to sync bookmarks to the Google Bookmarks web service.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#293

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

jdietrich wrote: post #255
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 8gb. There was a time when 1gb was more than enough. Now you're saying I should have 16gb -- and you're right! This is Not A Good Thing. This is people throwing every last feature -- even if it has a pile of 800kb of DLLs/SOs attached -- into every app, with no regard for memory. I find my system thrashing almost daily at this point. I need to upgrade. Two years ago, running predominantly the same software, 4G…

Python and Ruby are on average about 40x slower than C. Fifteen years ago, this relegated them to the status of "scripting languages" that were unsuitable for Real Work. Today, there are still plenty of important applications where every clock cycle matters, but many more where that performance difference is absolutely irrelevant. We have come to understand that developer time is vastly more valuable than computing r…

Funny that you should post this, and the next day on the front page of Hacker News an article talking about Ruby taking 30 servers, each of which running at 50% CPU utilization -- and still Rails would go to 100% utilization and crash the cluster when usage spiked -- while Go could run on a single server without even seemingly using CPU (5% was typical). [1] That's greater than a 40x speed improvement -- closer to 300x, going from 5% on one to 50% on 30.

>We have come to understand that developer time is vastly more valuable than computing resources

I get that, but still, 30 servers is pretty expensive. Having a full time engineer just to manage the cluster and write load balancing code is pretty expensive. Having down time because of a usage spike is pretty expensive. I'd rather pay for the smarter dev team myself, but I'm an engineer, so I'm biased.

Though fundamentally I wasn't talking about servers above. I was talking about desktops, and mostly Windows desktops. And having to install Python because that's what one developer prefers, and .NET because of another preference, and Perl because of a third, and Ruby because of a fourth, and Java because of a fifth...where does it end?

My own "scripting language" of choice is Lua. It's TINY, it's faster than all of the above (except, under some circumstances, Java -- but give Mike Pall another year or two and I bet LuaJIT will be beating Java in all the benchmarks instead of just many of them), and using it gives developers that productivity boost you're rightly saying is important.

And if you need more speed than Lua can give you, Go is a good option, if it comes to that. But as you point out, not every app needs every cycle.

[1] http://blog.iron.io/2013/03/how-we-went-from-30-servers-to-2...

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#294

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

Resident_Geek wrote: post #272
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If hogging lots of RAM makes my program legitimately run better It objectively doesn't make your program run better to waste RAM. If RAM usage goes up 2x every two years but RAM and hard drive speed go up 20% in the same time period, then using more RAM when you don't need it is making programs more sluggish to start and to suspend to disk, and it's making computers draw more power while sleeping (to keep that much…

Objectively? That's a dangerous word; I hope you've got a better argument than this one. Hard drives are being rapidly replaced by SSDs, so their speed just jumped _way_ up (especially start-up and random access times, which affect sleeping and waking performance). 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, not 20%.

SSDs are great. But I have exactly one hard drive bay in my laptop, and it currently holds >580Gb of data. Some of that is bloat, but MOST of it is real data; I have lots of raw video, source art for games, music, and many folders of compiled object files. I'm a game developer, so I use a lot of hard drive.

From what I've read, an SSD has an expected life of about 1-2 years. Aside from not being able to afford $2500 JUST for an SSD to hold my data [1], I can't fathom paying that much every 1-2 years as the drives die. Not to mention downtime and potential lost data (between the back-up and the failure).

I'd love to have an SSD. In a year or two, I probably will, as the costs will likely drop.

But until then, yes, the performance has objectively dropped.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology-2-5-Inch-Performance-OC...

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#295

Post by nickknw »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #187
tomkarlo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't open 100 apps on your computer and then complain about memory usage. Running 100 tabs at the same time, all of which may be running live JS processes, is about the same. It's a perfectly valid usage pattern but it's also going to eat a lot of memory. It's not like driving with your parking brake on, but it's like loading your car up with its maximum passenger capacity and then complaining that it's accelera…

I've done it before with earlier versions of Firefox on a system with fewer resources that yielded a substantially lower memory footprint. It is very possible to do a lot with less memory.

This sounds like it was possibly some time ago. If so, don't discount the effect of having less resource-intensive sites too.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#296

Post by gcr »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #141
jdietrich wrote: post #79

Memory use seems like a really pointless thing for users to care about. There's a widespread intuition that using RAM is inherently bad and low memory usage is a worthwhile goal, but it doesn't really make sense. The key performance goal is minimising latency, which is best served by using as much RAM as possible without having to swap out. RAM is now fantastically cheap. 16GB of DDR3 costs less than $120 in either D…

I have 8gb. There was a time when 1gb was more than enough. Now you're saying I should have 16gb -- and you're right! This is Not A Good Thing. This is people throwing every last feature -- even if it has a pile of 800kb of DLLs/SOs attached -- into every app, with no regard for memory. I find my system thrashing almost daily at this point. I need to upgrade. Two years ago, running predominantly the same software, 4G…

This is precisely the motivation behind the renaissance of the "simple / command-line-driven software movement" that you see sprouting up from the corners of the Arch Linux users, Slackware, and elsewhere.

I used to carry around a laptop with 128MB RAM. In 2010-2012, I had 1GB and was happy with it, but I had to adapt:

- Try a tiling window manager. You'd be surprised how many resources it takes to draw those window decorations, which not only saves RAM but also helps you focus better.

- Try a lightweight browser like LuaKit, dwm, surf, etc. Most of them are Webkit-based anyway, so there's not many problems. Plus, a keyboard-driven web browser is a hoot

- Try using emacs/vim instead of Word or OpenOffice. Thanks to LaTeX, I haven't touched a huge office suite in ages.

- Instead of having lots of programs open in the background, why not try some command-line equivalents? If you're not on windows, you have access to a world of utilities: music players, todo lists, file managers, etc.

Now I'm on an 8GB machine, and even under heavy load, I don't think I've ever come close to reaching that limit in the six months I've owned this box. (I don't have any swap space either)

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#297

Post by gcr »

k3n wrote: post #150
kintamanimatt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely disagree. We've seen too much complacency in recent years when it comes to memory usage. Developers think it's ok for their applications to bloat out and have a huge memory footprint. I'd rather applications were developed in such a way that they were more memory efficient. I've had a recent incident in which Chrome was consuming about 7GB of memory, just because I had about a hundred tabs open! It was rea…

There's no way you could effectively work with 100 tabs open, and that is surely a smell for inefficiency. For any given task, 5 tabs is probably reaching the upper limit on what's actually _required_, with around 10 being the upper limit. Granted, you could have multiple tasks ongoing in parallel, but are you really working in parallel at that point? If not, save the tabs and return to them later. I really doubt you…

I wish browsers would ditch tabs and switch to buffers. Emacs users know just how darn useful it is to keep 500 buffers open, each with fuzzy completion so you can switch to exactly what you want.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#298

Post by tripzilch »

a_p wrote: post #264
tripzilch wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, we'll have to see. I have the same problem as the GP (though up to 50 tabs usually) and indeed "bookmark all"+"close all" doesn't really help because if you never review those bookmarks, you tend not to take the step either. As someone else itt already said, a better solution would be some improved bookmarking system that I can use to just file away a tab, knowing that it'll be there when I need it, as we…

I'm not sure if I understand your comment. Firefox does allow you to organize bookmarks by tag, and it even lets you use the tag collection as a bookmark folder (meaning that you can add the tag to the bookmark bar and it behaves like a normal bookmark folder.) You can even add different links to different bookmark folders and give them the same tag, so that they appear under the original bookmark folder and under th…

Really? I have to admit never trying FF's bookmark system in depth, just Chrome and Opera. Well then. Thanks for the tip, I will try! (though my zillions-of-tabs problem mostly resides in Opera)
Post reply on HN