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Ask HN: One tab on Chrome takes about 100MB memory, why?

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Re: Ask HN: One tab on Chrome takes about 100MB memory, why?

#21

Post by [deleted] »

rasz wrote: post #14
glibgil wrote: post #4

> One tab on chrome takes about 100MB memory, why? Two reasons 1) Because, Chrome is ready to do something with that tab: browse the web. Do this, create a browser that doesn't use much memory when a tab is idle. Switch back to that tab and interact with the page or go to a new page. You will experience latency. It will feel slow. That's why the tab uses a lot of memory. It is staying ready at all times to be interac…

1 is entirely possible. Opera 12.x takes ~3-10MB per TAB (+the weight of the media used on the page). There is zero latency, opening new/switching tabs is instantaneous. Google devs use 16-32 core machines, often with hundreds of gigabytes ram. Why would they bother optimizing?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: One tab on Chrome takes about 100MB memory, why?

#22

Post by panarky »

akulbe wrote: post #19
Waterluvian wrote: post #3

I'm eager for info too. But while we're waiting, I have a genuine, not snarky, question too: does this ever actually negatively impact people's use of their computer? I can't recall ever feeling like my browser having lots of tabs open has changed the experience. RAM and resource usage hasn't been on my mind in years.

Yes, absolutely. I've had Chrome tabs take an inordinate amount of RAM and CPU and make the fans spin up. Enough so that other things were slow.

> inordinate amount of RAM and CPU and make the fans spin up

I almost always find that this is caused by a badly behaved website, not Chrome itself.

Some sites have horribly written JavaScript, or introduce ads that run their own CPU- and memory-intensive JavaScript.

Finding and closing those tabs, or disabling JavaScript, or using uBlock or uMatrix usually solves it for me.

Re: Ask HN: One tab on Chrome takes about 100MB memory, why?

#23

Post by DennisAleynikov »

rasz wrote: post #14
glibgil wrote: post #4

> One tab on chrome takes about 100MB memory, why? Two reasons 1) Because, Chrome is ready to do something with that tab: browse the web. Do this, create a browser that doesn't use much memory when a tab is idle. Switch back to that tab and interact with the page or go to a new page. You will experience latency. It will feel slow. That's why the tab uses a lot of memory. It is staying ready at all times to be interac…

1 is entirely possible. Opera 12.x takes ~3-10MB per TAB (+the weight of the media used on the page). There is zero latency, opening new/switching tabs is instantaneous. Google devs use 16-32 core machines, often with hundreds of gigabytes ram. Why would they bother optimizing?

this is supposed to be exaggerated but who the fuck uses a 32 core computer with hundreds for gigabytes of ram. Do you mean their data centers?

Re: Ask HN: One tab on Chrome takes about 100MB memory, why?

#24

Post by taspeotis »

DennisAleynikov wrote: post #23
rasz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 is entirely possible. Opera 12.x takes ~3-10MB per TAB (+the weight of the media used on the page). There is zero latency, opening new/switching tabs is instantaneous. Google devs use 16-32 core machines, often with hundreds of gigabytes ram. Why would they bother optimizing?

this is supposed to be exaggerated but who the fuck uses a 32 core computer with hundreds for gigabytes of ram. Do you mean their data centers?

The numbers might be slightly exaggerated. Nonetheless, they’re high-end machines.

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and...

Re: Ask HN: One tab on Chrome takes about 100MB memory, why?

#25

Post by dgquintas »

rasz wrote: post #14
glibgil wrote: post #4

> One tab on chrome takes about 100MB memory, why? Two reasons 1) Because, Chrome is ready to do something with that tab: browse the web. Do this, create a browser that doesn't use much memory when a tab is idle. Switch back to that tab and interact with the page or go to a new page. You will experience latency. It will feel slow. That's why the tab uses a lot of memory. It is staying ready at all times to be interac…

1 is entirely possible. Opera 12.x takes ~3-10MB per TAB (+the weight of the media used on the page). There is zero latency, opening new/switching tabs is instantaneous. Google devs use 16-32 core machines, often with hundreds of gigabytes ram. Why would they bother optimizing?

The standard machine has 32 GB. So I guess 0.32 hundreds... And for completeness, 6 physical cores, 12 logical with HT. Still beefy, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Re: Ask HN: One tab on Chrome takes about 100MB memory, why?

#28

Post by ausjke »

I used the tool called ps_mem.py which measures both private memory and resident memory, at the moment with 50 tabs it took 4.5GB.

Those RAM was really fully taken, unlike the VSZ. With more TABs my 8GB system will start slow down, as swap kicks in.

Yes I used the suspender but disabled it, sometimes it causes issues for me. I now depend on OneTab to use my computer properly.

Also, for special TABS it can eat so much memory that my system essentially stops responding suddenly, which is really annoying as you never know when it will happen. Can Chrome limit certain bad behavior TABs especially when it starts to take up all the memories?

I know each Tab is a process so it will not crash the whole browser, but the memory usage should be better handled no matter what.

Re: Ask HN: One tab on Chrome takes about 100MB memory, why?

#29

Post by Blindedwino »

dgquintas wrote: post #25
rasz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 is entirely possible. Opera 12.x takes ~3-10MB per TAB (+the weight of the media used on the page). There is zero latency, opening new/switching tabs is instantaneous. Google devs use 16-32 core machines, often with hundreds of gigabytes ram. Why would they bother optimizing?

The standard machine has 32 GB. So I guess 0.32 hundreds... And for completeness, 6 physical cores, 12 logical with HT. Still beefy, but nothing out of the ordinary.

I would venture to say that most of the world isn't using computers with 32GB RAM...

Re: Ask HN: One tab on Chrome takes about 100MB memory, why?

#30

Post by burfog »

Waterluvian wrote: post #3

I'm eager for info too. But while we're waiting, I have a genuine, not snarky, question too: does this ever actually negatively impact people's use of their computer? I can't recall ever feeling like my browser having lots of tabs open has changed the experience. RAM and resource usage hasn't been on my mind in years.

Yes indeed.

My computer at work has 16 GB. It gets slow. Every now and then, I'll open a web page that pushes things past a limit. The browser becomes completely unresponsive and sometimes I can't even move my mouse. While I'm suffering from running out of memory, the browser decides to use up even more memory to pop up a dialog to taunt me about it.

This can even happen without user action, for example when a page automatically loads a new ad. The ads on reddit seem particularly bad in this way. Randomly, one will eat all my RAM.

I often end up having to hold down the power button for 5 seconds. That, and pulling the power cord, are the only reasonable recovery. If I get "lucky", as I did a few days ago, Linux will kill the X11 server; this violently shuts down the whole GUI.

I really really hate the situation. I blame most of it on Chromium and Firefox, both of which don't make a serious attempt to keep things under control. A bit of blame goes to the fact that resources allocated in the X11 server can not be easily mapped back to web pages and thus kept within page-specific memory quotas.

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