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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?

#181

Post by endless1234 »

blattimwind wrote: post #164
endless1234 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The situation is no better on the server side, of course. Why write static HTML for your pageful of text when you can have a web framework pulling C++ from a SQL database, compiling it to web assembly on the fly and vomiting forth to the browser just in time Any example of where something like this is actually used? I'm also interested in hearing why browser rendering code goes unused when displaying a javascript-po…

With PHP there are a bunch of people who put PHP fragments in a database and pull that together with some queries, append and eval it. I wouldn't be that surprised to find someone doing it with PHP fragments echo'ing some JS.

It's certainly _possible_. I just think it was unnecessary hyperbole that doesn't really have anything to do with the topic at hand, since a static pure html website is going to use a lot of memory on Chrome anyway.

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

#182

Post by Reedx »

king_magic wrote: post #139
nkkollaw wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aww, come on. People want and expect websites to be very close to web applications that react to who you are, what actions you take on the page and a myriad of other factors. That's just not possible with static HTML.

I fundamentally disagree. I don’t think ‘people’ really do want that. That reminds me of the thinking during the 90’s and early 00’s that everyone somehow must want 10 browser toolbars that spam them with ads all the time.

Well, that wasn't really about what they thought people wanted, it was about what toolbar makers thought could get away with (or trick people into). They wanted everyone to use their toolbar filled with ads. And some unsophisticated users ended up installing 10 different toolbars.

An example from the late 90s might be the idea that people wanted intro animations and music on web sites, heh.

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

#183

Post by agnivade »

minitech wrote: post #72
burfog wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> I often end up having to hold down the power button for 5 seconds. If you enable the magic SysRq key, Alt+Print Screen+F will trigger the OOM killer. Quick enable for those who want it: kernel.sysrq = 1 in /etc/sysctl.d/90-sysrq.conf. > I blame most of it on Chromium and Firefox I rarely have this problem with modern Firefox, but also block ads so maybe that makes the difference. Chrome is always bad, though.

Not all heroes wear capes.

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

#184

Post by olivermarks »

petee wrote: post #124
olivermarks wrote: post #27

I use Opera as my primary browser because Chrome is slow, a memory hog and makes the fans on my macbook air really noisy

At the core, Opera is still Chromium. Either way I use it primarily too, certainly snappier than Chrome itself

I'm aware it is core Chromium but it seems to run way faster...

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

#185

Post by MaxBarraclough »

tim333 wrote: post #160
tsukikage wrote: post #123

Because it is 2018 and people have forgotten how to static HTML. All that lovely rendering code in your browser goes unused as people rewrite it in Javascript, badly; or even in C++ and then compile to web assembly, that’s all the rage now, because why stick with one layer of abstraction when you can involve three? Oh, and of course everyone rolls their own, so that website with the dancing pigs not only has its own…

However if you open a static HTML website such as the tasteful http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ it still shows 122 MB used in Chrome Task Manager in spite of the source being 0.005 MB.

Eh, even that site uses Google Analytics. There's a comment in the HTML:

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

#186

Post by KirinDave »

littlestymaar wrote: post #146
noxToken wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need every application to be the leanest that it can be. What I need is for every application stop assuming that 12 GB of free memory means that it's their 12 GB. I understand the adage of free memory being wasted memory, but there's a context for that adage. E.g. if a user clicks off of a tab, the browser doesn't need to write that tab's contents to disk when 12 GB is free. A good trade off is to store the t…

Free memory isn't wasted memory though, it's file system cache memory ! If a software uses 100% of the available RAM, it means all your file system call are going to be hard drive IOs (not everybody has ssd mate).

If you actually cared about this you provision a ramdisk. But this is a talking point, not an actual argument.

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

#187

Post by RexM »

chrismorgan wrote: post #98
tmd83 wrote: 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…

I recently switched to fastmail and was able to go from 3 pinned gmail tabs to 1 pinned fastmail tab handling all of my email.

It’s so fast and I really like what you guys are doing. Thanks!

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

#188

Post by Sylos »

chaboud wrote: post #90
zeusk wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OS should use all available RAM it practically can for things like cache. Not the applications.

That may not actually be a practical approach to the problem. Years (and jobs) ago, we rolled significant caching into Vegas (video editor), allowing the app to take up 8GB of RAM in cached frames, even on 32-bit builds. There was no way for the OS to do this sort of work for us. The best that the operating system would have been able to do would have been to cache file reads for us. Caching the output of computation…

There are exceptions, but in almost all cases, an application hacking the OS' RAM management is slowing down other applications disproportionally in order to make itself seem faster.

Shaming such RAM hogging applications is not just legitimate, it's very much necessary. Otherwise all applications would just reserve as much RAM as they can convince the OS to give them, even if they have no real use for it. There is no checks for this in place, so users need to understand the technical implications and punish RAM hoggers by avoiding them.

If your application can utilize RAM to disproportionally speed itself up and therefore on average speed up the workflow of most users, then that's legitimate, too, and an informed user will see the value.

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

#189

Post by Sylos »

littlestymaar wrote: post #145
godelmachine wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll check. Guess Firefox copied this feature from Chrome.

Fortunately they didn't : they use one process for the browser UI, and a few (like two or four) processes for tabs which are dispatched between those process. It's way better than Chrome in term of memory consumption when you have lots of tabs opened.

I think, the number of processes (by default) is set to how many cores you have on your CPU. That way you can achieve almost the maximum of parallelism with a minimum of RAM use.

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

#190

Post by IncRnd »

gravypod wrote: post #159
IncRnd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one I mentioned is a precision w/ 2x2680. These dropped in price and flooded the market after leases finished. There are too many problems and finicky nonsense with adding extra video cards (due to the power supply). I also have an HP w/ 2x2680v2 128GB on the way. Using the HP I'll be able use for some projects a few of the old nanos and 295x2s I have sitting around. These are so cheap now.

Do you have any model numbers or suggestions as to where to buy this sort of stuff? I want to get (always wanted really) a dev server for home.

Sure. You can start here. https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&D...
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