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The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

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Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#31

Post by insulanian »

hga wrote: post #12

What I do, when Chrome, or rather, my abuse of it (14 windows, 735 tabs at the moment, Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit on a 32 GiB system) becomes onerous is to go to the task manager and kill groups of tabs taking up "too much" memory, and very occasionally, too much CPU. (I get away with that abuse, which it a bit higher right now because I'm in the process of buying a house, by killing all tabs after launching, and only enabl…

I'm genuinely interested in the reasons people maintain so many tabs open. What type of workflow you have when you end up with so much stuff open?

How do you get back to some of those tabs? Wouldn't it be easier to just google it again when you need it instead of having it lingering around and wasting your HW resources?

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#32

Post by scholia »

ngrilly wrote: post #27
anexprogrammer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, good, it's not just me! One anecdote - 5 years ago FF was the clear winner for coping with tab abuse. Stable and coped with hundreds of tabs happily, Chrome started crashing pages beyond 50 or so. Now it's the perfect reverse, FF hates a lot of tabs open and Chrome is stable with apparently limitless numbers.

Anybody knows what changed in Firefox?

Maybe the pages got bigger? On my Windows 7 PC, FF still handles a lot more tabs than Chrome, typically 2x or 3x as many.

Where Firefox falls over is with really heavy pages, such as infinite-scrolling image/gif sites. It's much better than it used to be, but it's still vulnerable.

With Chrome, pages fail to load (giving a blank page) and the Flash plug-in crashes. The browser does stay up, but the effect is the same: you have to restart it.

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#33

Post by scholia »

insulanian wrote: post #31
hga wrote: post #12

What I do, when Chrome, or rather, my abuse of it (14 windows, 735 tabs at the moment, Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit on a 32 GiB system) becomes onerous is to go to the task manager and kill groups of tabs taking up "too much" memory, and very occasionally, too much CPU. (I get away with that abuse, which it a bit higher right now because I'm in the process of buying a house, by killing all tabs after launching, and only enabl…

I'm genuinely interested in the reasons people maintain so many tabs open. What type of workflow you have when you end up with so much stuff open? How do you get back to some of those tabs? Wouldn't it be easier to just google it again when you need it instead of having it lingering around and wasting your HW resources?

They accumulate. Every day there are two or three pages you intend to read later, so you leave them open. A month later, you have an extra 100 tabs loaded. After six months, you have 600. There are also clusters of tabs associated with some research you were doing but didn't quite finish.

Then the problem is it would take a couple of days to go through all the waiting tabs and shut them down, and you don't have a couple of days to spare.

Eventually you just save them all out as a session and start again, and hope you will learn from your mistakes ;-)

I've switched from FF/Chrome to FF/Vivaldi because it has much better ways to handle tabs and bookmarks than Chrome does. Vivaldi does tab stacking, for example.

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#34

Post by scholia »

alimbada wrote: post #21
Sarkie wrote: post #2

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/09/tab-discar...

I think this feature would be much more useful if, instead of waiting for the system to run low on memory, I could define a memory usage threshold at which Chrome starts discarding tabs.

Agreed. It would also be nice to limit the number of separate processes that Chrome uses.

It's interesting to compare RAM/resource usage of a blank page in Google Docs in Chrome with a lightweight program such as Microsoft Word ;-)

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#35

Post by nightcracker »

scholia wrote: post #33
insulanian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely interested in the reasons people maintain so many tabs open. What type of workflow you have when you end up with so much stuff open? How do you get back to some of those tabs? Wouldn't it be easier to just google it again when you need it instead of having it lingering around and wasting your HW resources?

They accumulate. Every day there are two or three pages you intend to read later, so you leave them open. A month later, you have an extra 100 tabs loaded. After six months, you have 600. There are also clusters of tabs associated with some research you were doing but didn't quite finish. Then the problem is it would take a couple of days to go through all the waiting tabs and shut them down, and you don't have a cou…

Maybe a 'read later' extension could help you? Something longer-term than a tab, but shorter-term than a bookmark.

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#36

Post by dharma1 »

great chrome addon, been using it for a year or two.

I've got around 40-50 tabs open usually, and "spring clean" all but the active one a couple of times a day (right click a tab, close other tabs). Chrome used to be a complete memory hog until this addon.

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#37

Post by scholia »

nightcracker wrote: post #35
scholia wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They accumulate. Every day there are two or three pages you intend to read later, so you leave them open. A month later, you have an extra 100 tabs loaded. After six months, you have 600. There are also clusters of tabs associated with some research you were doing but didn't quite finish. Then the problem is it would take a couple of days to go through all the waiting tabs and shut them down, and you don't have a cou…

Maybe a 'read later' extension could help you? Something longer-term than a tab, but shorter-term than a bookmark.

Yes. What I do now is save the page as an mhtml file so I can read it later without having to find it again. (Chrome should really offer better mhtml support.)

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#38

Post by Kristine1975 »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #30
leni536 wrote: post #8

Idea: What if there was an OS interface to mark memory regions as "throwaway"? Throwaway in the sense that it's less costly to recalculate than to recall it from swap. So the OS would throw such memory regions instead of swapping out and signal the process about it to recalculate it if needed. I don't usually bump into heavy swap usage except when I wake my laptop from hibernate. I tend to close browsers before hiber…

There has been some thoughts about implementing this for linux, but I don't think it got very far. The idea is that you mark a range of memory as "volatile", and the OS will free that when it's running low on memory. In most cases where you're running out of memory though, swapping out pages or killing a program using the memory is probably the right thing to do though. https://lwn.net/Articles/522135/

There was also this in 2009: http://lwn.net/Articles/340080/

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#39

Post by c22 »

scholia wrote: post #33
insulanian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely interested in the reasons people maintain so many tabs open. What type of workflow you have when you end up with so much stuff open? How do you get back to some of those tabs? Wouldn't it be easier to just google it again when you need it instead of having it lingering around and wasting your HW resources?

They accumulate. Every day there are two or three pages you intend to read later, so you leave them open. A month later, you have an extra 100 tabs loaded. After six months, you have 600. There are also clusters of tabs associated with some research you were doing but didn't quite finish. Then the problem is it would take a couple of days to go through all the waiting tabs and shut them down, and you don't have a cou…

I'm having the problem right now of hundreds of tabs open on my phone, I context-switch out of the browser when I'm done and end up leaving dormant tabs all over the place. Unfortunately whenever I try to scroll through them to close the non-relevant ones Chrome crashes, usually restoring several of the tabs I'd successfully closed.
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