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Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

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Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#161

Post by mikeash »

cookiecaper wrote: post #83
overcast wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it doesn't, then why does it grind to a halt eventually on both Mac and Windows? Firefox suffers from the same nonsense as well. In fact, Safari seems to be the ONLY thing I can keep open for more than a day without a process restart.

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…

Why is it that whenever somebody has a problem that less than 100% of people experience, the response is always "you must be doing it wrong" rather than "I must be lucky"?

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#162

Post by xigency »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #138
xigency wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an example: http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/ Opening another tab creates a new bakery, not a view into the same bakery. (This only works if you haven't played before or clear your cookies.) Edit: If you really want to keep the same functionality then you would need to bring server communication into the mix. It's possible to either run the simulation server-side, or at least communicate the state betwe…

The point still being, with this change you can have only one tab doing server communication at "full throttle", which may kill whatever gameplay elements make the players open this game in multiple tabs.

I'm not sure on the Chrome implementation, but I think all of the visible tabs would be foreground, not background. So the issue would be refreshing when changing tabs. (And also communicating between visible tabs).

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#163

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #61
dumbmatter wrote: post #4

What are we supposed to do about stuff this? Like I wrote a video game https://play.basketball-gm.com/ that lets you open multiple tabs for viewing multiple screens even while simulation is occurring in another tab. But Chrome recently stopped running the simulation if it's in a background tab. Putting my simulation code in a Shared Worker would be nice, except Safari and IE will never support it and it seems likely…

It would be dodgy hack, but another HN comment made reference to a statement that tabs playing audio are always considered "foregrounded": https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...

Their own Google Play would be impacted otherwise. Good to hear, since the only thing I use Chrome for is Google Play (and any other, one-off, old-fashioned sites which require Flash). Why in the world does Google still require Flash for... anything?

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#164

Post by k__ »

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.

Probably the same thinking that goes with storing everything on the desktop or having many windows open.

I'm more of a less is more guy, when it comes to windows/tabs.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#165

Post by rhizome »

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.

Could be the sites themselves.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#166

Post by blauditore »

cortesoft wrote: post #126
blauditore wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 navi…

Yeah, I basically do the same thing, but that hardly ever requires 10 tabs for me. When that happens, finding tabs becomes especially harder once their width starts to shrink.

As for read-later, I usually pull them into the bookmarks bar (top level, directly visible) to free up some space.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#167

Post by cbhl »

NTripleOne wrote: post #127
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...

Even on a desktop machine, you don't want tabs spinning in the background (using electricity) if you don't need the work being done. That's bad for your wallet and bad for the environment.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#168

Post by Ajedi32 »

bsg75 wrote: post #155
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...

Any experience on how it compared to The Great Discarder from the same dev? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-discarde...

The description for that extension in the store explains it pretty well:

"""

Advantages over The Great Suspender:

- More memory savings

- Compatible with chrome tab syncing

- Super lightweight extension that uses no content scripts or persistent background scripts

Disadvantages over The Great Suspender:

- No visibility on which tabs have been suspended

- Unable to prevent a tab from reloading when it gains focus

"""

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#169

Post by k__ »

SerLava wrote: post #122
blauditore wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Finding the right tab is much harder if you got a whole bunch of them.

I always close them, most aren't needed for a long time.

But if I need stuff I closed I just hit 'reopen closed tab' a few times.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#170

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

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?

Yes. The browser is slowly becoming it's own operating system. Like Oracle making a bare-metal version of their database, pretty soon, Google will just skip ChromeOS, bundle Chrome with a storage driver, input driver, and video and sound drivers, and be done with it.
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