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Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

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Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#171

Post by blauditore »

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.

Well, it's quite similar to garbage collection, or disk defragmentation. It comes with some cost but improves performance, so it's all about finding the best trade-off.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#172

Post by humblebee »

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.

There might be a more effective way to accomplish what I do with many tabs, but it works for me at the moment so I haven't attempted to find a browser plugin or extension to change the behavior.

I use many tabs as a stack of pages when debugging, researching, or reading aggregate news feeds (reddit, hn). It usually starts with a Google search or two, in which I open all links I think _might_ be relevant based off of what information google can provide me from the results page.

From there I read through each and open any further tabs if anything is linked too in the text (I hardly ever actually click navigate, it's most always a new tab). Generally this only goes about 3 deep (search, first page, sub links). I will close any pages that I find have no useful information, but if there is anything I think might be useful in the next 30 minutes I just leave it open. I do this for each of the results I originally opened. Somewhere in the 7-15 tabs generally is the answer I'm looking for or at least there is enough information I can answer my question. If any link is particularly beneficial, I will bookmark it. Generally the time span I have a large number of tabs open is no more than an hour before I'm finished and close everything out.

Chrome handles this nicely, if you are on a page and open a tab, it will place the new tab next to the current tab, instead of at the end of the tab list. Some sort of tree tab view would probably work much better for this, but Chromes behavior isn't bad for what I do.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#173

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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…

I'm using tabs in exactly the same way. For the read later tabs something like http://www.tabsnooze.com/ might help. I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds good. "Save to Inbox" is another option.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#174

Post by mcintyre1994 »

kakarot wrote: post #144
baby wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you use Tree Style Tabs. I've been using it for years and I have no idea how other people can efficiently browse the web without it.

Tree Style Tabs is a nice idea, but I found the balance of aesthetic and speed for me to be with pressing Ctrl+L and then inputting a few letters relating to the open tab I seek, then just pressing Enter and switching to the tab.

I don't understand why this seems to only be a thing in Firefox - it's awesome.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#175

Post by xiaoma »

PetahNZ wrote: post #139
onion2k wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer you need to decide whether or not to support a browser, and if that browser doesn't provide the APIs you need then you should drop support for that feature in that browser. In this case, if Chrome is making a change that you can't or won't change your game for then the solution is to detect Chrome and display a "This game only works in a single tab in Chrome. Try Firefox!" message if a user opens it in…

It's your customers that generally dictate what browser you support.

Not if you have content or apps they really want.

I prefer Firefox, but since Google broke Google Voice (now Hangouts) plugin for FF users, I've been grudgingly opening a Chrome browser each time I want to make a phone call to US number.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#176

Post by altimin »

Hi, this is Alexander. I'm an engineer on Chromium team working on scheduling and on background tab throttling in particular.

Firstly, I want to make clear that we are not shipping this in Chrome 56. We have enabled throttling as an experiment in beta channel to measure impact and collect feedback from web devs. We will aim to ship it in Chrome 57, subject to further feedback.

In response to concerns voiced we will disable aggressive throttling when active websocket connection is present. Tabs playing audio are already unthrottled.

We will also consider more signals to use in exempting a page from this throttling: metatag, pinned tabs, permission to show notifications from user. Please leave a comment in the bug (crbug.com/650594) if you have other suggestions.

Looking forward to your feedback, Alexander.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#177

Post by visakanv »

blauditore wrote: post #166
cortesoft wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use one-tab.com; works fantastically for me. Not a huge stretch to say it changed my life.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#178

Post by gyrgtyn »

kakarot wrote: post #144
baby wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you use Tree Style Tabs. I've been using it for years and I have no idea how other people can efficiently browse the web without it.

Tree Style Tabs is a nice idea, but I found the balance of aesthetic and speed for me to be with pressing Ctrl+L and then inputting a few letters relating to the open tab I seek, then just pressing Enter and switching to the tab.

How do you get this feature? I know I've seen it, but it's not doing it on Mac Chrome.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#179

Post by redthrowaway »

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...

Unfortunately, I find a lot of sites don't play nice with The Great Suspender. Lots of js-heavy sites would break when they were "resumed", resulting in my place in an article/podcast/video/etc being lost. I'm glad Google is addressing the issue; hopefully they'll do so in a way that's more transparent to the user.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#180

Post by TeMPOraL »

mikeash wrote: post #24
valarauca1 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Measuring memory usage is hard on a modern OS. Not in the slightest. OS's have to allocate virtual memory to each process or that process with SIG-FAULT when it touches invalid memory. Tracking per-process memory usage is one of the most trivial things OS/Pref tools do.

Measuring it is easy. Defining it is what's hard. If three processes each have the same 10MB executable mapped into memory, plus 10MB of heap data, how much memory is each process using? There's no easy answer to that question.

Yeah, it depends on what exactly you're asking for. But one can provide different visualizations for different questions.

As a typical computer user, this is what I care about:

- who the frak is eating all my RAM?

- which processes should I kill to get some memory back?

Whatever the weird sharing things are going on, the memory is ultimately linear. So show me a large rectangle subdivided into sections, each one representing memory associated with a set of processes. One section for "this memory is used by Chrome.exe". One for "this memory is used by Chrome.exe, X.exe and Y.exe". One for "this memory is free".

When I click on a section, it should highlight all the processes that share this memory. When I click on a process, it should highlight all the sections this process uses or shares with others.

This way, I could quickly see who's wasting my RAM and how many processes do I need to kill to get some chunk of memory back.

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