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

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111–120 of 210 posts

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

#111
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they don't offer that on their laptops, but what the OP is talking about is a desktop machine. Apple definitely offers 32 GB in their desktops.

OP is talking about the machines Google devs use, and I am betting they are definitely not desktop machines.

they are desktop machines.

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

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome devs are given both a laptop (most choose a MacBook Pro) and a fairly beefy desktop. My one had 64G of RAM, and that was given to me six years ago.

Are those 64GB for browsing the web as parent poster claims, or for compiling software, leaving much less for web browsing?

Did you know that it remains free when you’re not compiling in a moment?

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

#113
post #106
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm perfectly willing to wait a second for the page to be reloaded from solid-state storage, if I haven't visited the page for an hour or more. Some people might say I shouldn't keep hundreds of tabs open for weeks. But I'm an old guy, and by my standards my laptop is a freakin supercomputer, so in my mind it should be able to handle all the web pages I can manually throw at it.

> I'm perfectly willing to wait a second for the page to be reloaded from solid-state storage, if I haven't visited the page for an hour or more. Great, then set vm.swappiness = 100 And stop complaining about about virtual memory usage.

And stop being quite so snarky to users who may not know about these hidden settings.

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you lack the memory necessary to do something else, you shouldn't care. This is exactly the attitude that leads to such problems. Applications that assume they can use all of the available memory on the machine are hostile to multitasking environments.

Applications should use all available RAM they practically can for things like cache. Ideally they will hold on to it lightly so other applications can take what they need. Entirely unused RAM is a waste if never used.

This is built into any operating system. If an application frees up memory, the OS doesn't throw that data out, it just marks it as "can be overwritten" and ensures that it actually can be overwritten without data loss (so, if the data in RAM has been changed, it writes back these changes to the hard drive).

Yes, you can actually manage RAM more efficiently for your application, if you just reserve a whole bunch of it and work inside of that, but at best you'll trick your users into thinking your applications is fast, but it's not actually in the interest of the user. If they wanted to dedicate all RAM to your application, they would not have opened a second application.

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

#115
post #36
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm perfectly willing to wait a second for the page to be reloaded from solid-state storage, if I haven't visited the page for an hour or more. Some people might say I shouldn't keep hundreds of tabs open for weeks. But I'm an old guy, and by my standards my laptop is a freakin supercomputer, so in my mind it should be able to handle all the web pages I can manually throw at it.

As a person who also has way too manu tabs open at all times, I've had success with the great suspender [0]. It "suspends" pages after a timeout so they use less memory. [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

Seconded. I reliably have a few hundred tabs open, and GS keeps them all manageable.

It’s not always happy if Chrome crashes or I have to do a cold reboot, but mostly it keeps Chrome’s gluttony under control.

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

#116
post #36
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm perfectly willing to wait a second for the page to be reloaded from solid-state storage, if I haven't visited the page for an hour or more. Some people might say I shouldn't keep hundreds of tabs open for weeks. But I'm an old guy, and by my standards my laptop is a freakin supercomputer, so in my mind it should be able to handle all the web pages I can manually throw at it.

As a person who also has way too manu tabs open at all times, I've had success with the great suspender [0]. It "suspends" pages after a timeout so they use less memory. [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

The current version also has a bug where it will create so many cookies on google-owned domains that it will exceed the header limit and cause a 500 response. The dev refuses to fix it until he implements a feature to make suspended tabs persist across updates, which is apparently slow going.

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

#117
post #87

To my overly long TODO-list I added a web browser project. I would like to see something akin to Links [0] or Lynx [1] with a bit of Dillo [2], but also for mobile. Features & non-features: - it would generally work like the reader mode (no other modes) trying to place navigation links in a predictable place - user can easily select text size and color schemes - night mode (Android does not have one) - because of it'…

You might find Min to your liking.

https://minbrowser.github.io/min/

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

#118
post #67
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?

>Google devs use 16-32 core machines, often with hundreds of gigabytes ram You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Most devs at Google use MacBook Pros.. which cannot even be upgraded to hold hundreds of gigs of ram.

The standard setup is a Linux desktop workstation - typically 6-8 core and 32-64gig ram depending on age (although there are some special set ups).

The required build tools and software for the internal engineering systems aren't usually available on a Mac so you'll need to have a Linux machine (physical or virtual) somewhere to remote into to do any dev work (again some teams are different but the bulk of engineers use the centralised Google infrastructure for source control, builds etc)

In addition to the desktop, every engineer gets a choice of laptop (Mac/windows/Chromebook) as well for email, meetings and cat videos.

Non-engineering just get a single laptop. Many many people now pick to use Chromebooks.

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

#119
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person who also has way too manu tabs open at all times, I've had success with the great suspender [0]. It "suspends" pages after a timeout so they use less memory. [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

The current version also has a bug where it will create so many cookies on google-owned domains that it will exceed the header limit and cause a 500 response. The dev refuses to fix it until he implements a feature to make suspended tabs persist across updates, which is apparently slow going.

Well, it is opensource so anyone can fix it for fun or profit: https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender

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

#120
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what functionality does it provide for that tons of javascript? I am asking honestly because most of the magic of gmail (which I love) is on the server side. The functionality that it has on the client side is trivial and in some cases atrocious. In these days it cannot even resize the compose box. The power of it's search bar should require trivial amount of client side code, so should the auto save. The only th…

(Key point: Gmail uses over 100MB where FastMail uses 10MB. Careful engineering helps a lot.) Gmail provides a lot more functionality with that JavaScript than you may think. There’s a fair bit of magic that goes into making an email client work as you want it to. That being said: most web apps are surprisingly inefficient in their memory usage (I find it surprising, anyway), and Gmail is no exception. I last used Gm…

That's what I believe too. Thing's are always harder to implement than you believe at first as a developer I know that. But even than the only explanation I can think of gmail's heaviness is not caring. In some ways it's even worse than a blog or news site which is often image heavy, required or not than can at least use up a lot of memory. Gmail on the other hand is not and it's something that is essentially meant to be opened for hours, gives a simple interface that suggests it would be light whereas taking up more memory than some bloated desktop client.
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