Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#121

Post by xg15 » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:11 PM UTC

Seems to me this is still just an intent-to-implement, i.e., the discussion about the feasibillity of the feature and the exact implementation details is still very much ongoing. It might be useful to contribute to the discussion at [1]. An outline about the implementation details is given in [2].

The dev team also acknowledges this is a breaking change for the web and considers it an "intervention" according to [3]. This admittedly doesn't mean much, but at least gives some basic standard of procedure that sites can follow to keep impact on a minimum.

Also noteable is this bit from the current discussion: We mitigate this by only throttling timer tasks; other tasks such as loading tasks will continue to run unthrottled.

Sounds to me as if this could mean that IO events are not effected. So sites that currently poll for notifications in the background might work around the throttle but using long polling or web socket push instead.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...

[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vCUeGfr2xzZ67SFt2yZjNeaI...

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#122

Post by SerLava » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:12 PM UTC

blauditore wrote: post #110

mcescalante wrote: post #8

It's awesome to see Chrome trying to improve performance for people with many tabs open, which is many of us. I use a LOT of tabs, and the best plugin has been The Great Suspender. Highly recommend it for anyone who wants memory & CPU back and keeps many tabs/windows open at once: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

I meet many tab hoarders (always open a new one, never close any, ending up with hundrets), but just can't wrap my head around it! I hate having more than 6-7 simultaneously open because it gets increasingly harder to keep an overview of what you're doing. The same applies for IDE tabs or windows. Too much of them and finding the right one becomes increasingly hard, and losing the thread more likely.

If you have to deal with a lot of task switching, blindly closing browser tabs would be a huge waste of time. You can individually check each tab before closing the ones you don't need, but that takes time and cognitive load.

So I leave them open until the computer can't handle it.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#123

Post by discreditable » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:12 PM UTC

ajanuary wrote: post #95

discreditable wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just what I was thinking. RIP Cookie Clicker.

Wouldn't Cookie Clicker be doing updates based on time deltas? There's no guarantees a timer will fire after the desired time even without this update. Or am I missing a feature that requires it to be able to continually process in the background?

CC only runs while you have its tab open. I'd assume there's some function that updates state regularly (even if it's only the regular auto-saves).

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#124

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:12 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #84

This sounds a lot like the problem Android had with background tasks. Starting in KitKat, a batching mechanism was introduced, so that apps which declared that they wanted CPU or screen resources in the future didn't all have separate timers running, but instead became members of a class that wanted similar things. One of the most effective features of Greenify, a battery-saving app, is to force all apps (or all apps…

[deleted]

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#125

Post by drinkjuice » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:12 PM UTC

Phlarp wrote: post #55

drinkjuice wrote: post #50

How about displaying more info about the "weight" of a page, when it comes to downloaded assets, cookies / local storage, RAM and CPU usage? I know there are ass backwards and fugly ways to see all of that, but why can't I see a list of all open tabs, with columns of such info which I get to define and sort as I please? Why not have the option to that info pop up when hovering over a tab, and to show notification ico…

You do know that Chrome has a task manager that will display memory, CPU and network usage for each tab right?

Yeah, make that "allow docking the task manager". Though I still miss a total about how many bytes got downloaded, average speed etc. I also miss it in other browsers (though I should have made that more clear, I wasn't meaning to "bash Chrome" -- this frustrates me since the departure of old Opera, with all browsers, I love the powerful web API stuff but I hate the user interface directions).

And to repeat myself, I really do miss something akin to the icon that displays which tabs are playing sound -- not for myself, but because it would allow people to notice the difference between bloated and well crafted pages more easily.

I appreciate they prefer to automatically decide what is best, but I would prefer more gauges, at least as an accessible option. If you hide something behind an "advanced" label, it will just scare people off for no reason. It's not like configurations dialog aren't kinda barren and padded as is. Just fix that and then just put things there, neatly categorized and maybe even searchable, and explain them. People can drive cars and vote for politicians, but we can't trust them to read? Just about any image viewer or video player seems to think more highly of people than browsers of all things do.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#126

Post by cortesoft » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:14 PM UTC

blauditore wrote: post #110

mcescalante wrote: post #8

It's awesome to see Chrome trying to improve performance for people with many tabs open, which is many of us. I use a LOT of tabs, and the best plugin has been The Great Suspender. Highly recommend it for anyone who wants memory & CPU back and keeps many tabs/windows open at once: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

I meet many tab hoarders (always open a new one, never close any, ending up with hundrets), but just can't wrap my head around it! I hate having more than 6-7 simultaneously open because it gets increasingly harder to keep an overview of what you're doing. The same applies for IDE tabs or windows. Too much of them and finding the right one becomes increasingly hard, and losing the thread more likely.

When I am doing coding work, I often have a ton of tabs open. I will keep different documentation tabs open to the relevant sections. I will keep some tabs with answers on StackOverflow.

My open tabs are kinda like my working memory. I could close them and reopen them as needed, but it is easier to just click a tab then to try to find the thing again. In addition, sometimes the pages I am looking at have dynamic navigation, and closing and reopening the page will require a good deal of navigation to find the section I was looking at. Plus, the overall time to reload the content, where if I just have the tab open there is no download time.

Also, the tab icons help me remember what I was looking at. I will often keep tabs open for what I wanted to read later.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#127

Post by NTripleOne » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:15 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #20

I like the change as a general idea but there obviously needs to be a manual override. Like, I don't want websites to access my camera without permission but obviously I want to allow some websites to do that. A similar permission could be used here and is perfectly backwards compatible: 1. a tab exceeds its quota and throttling kicks in; 2. you visit the tab to check why it stopped working; 3. you get a permission p…

>3.

I swear to god if I see anything mentioning a battery on a desktop machine with no battery...

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#128

Post by mcescalante » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:16 PM UTC

ausjke wrote: post #100

mcescalante wrote: post #8

It's awesome to see Chrome trying to improve performance for people with many tabs open, which is many of us. I use a LOT of tabs, and the best plugin has been The Great Suspender. Highly recommend it for anyone who wants memory & CPU back and keeps many tabs/windows open at once: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

same here using The great suspender, how does this throttle thing relate to the suspender?

If you are using The Great Suspender, chances are that background tabs are going to be fully suspended so the aggressive throttling isn't even needed.

tl;dr - Great suspender is even "more aggressive" than the outlined throttling, as it fully suspends the page and returns all CPU and RAM to you, so it's a great solution for people interested in throttling background tabs.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#129

Post by mulrian » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:17 PM UTC

overcast wrote: post #97

cookiecaper wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're doing something wrong. I use Chrome on Windows as my main now and I usually have more than 100 tabs open. I just switched a few months ago from Firefox on Linux, also usually with 100 tabs or more open. Both are very stable. Chrome is worse with handling tons of tabs, but I certainly don't have daily crashes. People who have extremely unstable/inconsistent experiences with these platforms usually have a rogue…

For every person that has my symptoms, there is someone to counter it. I'm not going to get into an argument about how I'm using my browser incorrectly. Every computer / browser combo I've ever used exhibits the same thing, and I'm pretty religious with keeping things trim and clean.

Using a lot of extensions?

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#130

Post by cabalamat » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:17 PM UTC

> Popular applications like Slack and Discord, as well as our own application (BitMEX, a Bitcoin trading site) will be hugely and adversely affected by this.

Good, if web apps will become less reliant on doing everything in the server, so I will be able to open up multiple tabs without slowing down a computer.

Finally, a reason to move to Chrome! (Currently a Firefox user)