Browsers eating RAM • Hacker News Board

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#71

Post by ASalazarMX » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

lucideer wrote: post #25

zamadatix wrote: post #11

Don't have a Mac so can't look into it but can anyone confirm this test is actually right? E.g. Brave claims (I don't use Brave I just know they had this claim) Safari is worse for memory usage https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology... while this product that uses Safari claims it's 10x better. Obviously both claims can't be true. From what I remember with Edge (pre Chromium) and Firefox I'm goi…

Anecdata: I find browser RAM usage varies enormously depending on which specific websites you use. The Flotato test uses Twitter and Gmail (for the first set; it doesn't specify the sites used for the 2nd set). Both Twitter and Gmail are large, complex, slow webapps which likely do some sort of advanced active memory management (extensive use of service workers, local storage, etc.). They also load mainly (exclusivel…

As a side note, GMail memory usage has improved vastly (probably because it was monstruous to begin with). Years ago my GMail tab consumed almost 500 Mb, but nowadays it uses less than 100, with my same usage patterns.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#72

Post by pseudalopex » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

Jyaif wrote: post #49

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #33

> I reached a point where I could barely hear the podcast I was trying to listen to. That's how loud the fan was. > focuses mainly on memory usage I mean I get it, Chrome is not the most efficient browser out there and Safari is more efficient in terms of memory and power usage. I'd probably use Safari as my daily browser if I didn't depend on Chrome's dev tools. What's the tradeoff though? Usually you sacrifice memo…

Security and stability is an other tradeoff: isolating code by running it in separate processes has a cost both in terms of memory and CPU.

Safari has separate processes.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#73

Post by droidist2 » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 8:22 PM UTC

This type of browser looks good to use along with tiled window managers like i3 and xmonad.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#74

Post by wooger » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 8:40 PM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #11

Don't have a Mac so can't look into it but can anyone confirm this test is actually right? E.g. Brave claims (I don't use Brave I just know they had this claim) Safari is worse for memory usage https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology... while this product that uses Safari claims it's 10x better. Obviously both claims can't be true. From what I remember with Edge (pre Chromium) and Firefox I'm goi…

We already know apple's own software has special exemptions in the OS e.g. from packet sniffers.

Any reason to trust the ram usage for Safari nowadays?

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#75

Post by leokennis » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

rovr138 wrote: post #5

Flotato, From homepage, >From browser tab to magic Mac app. >Break free from the browser and add web pages to your Mac dock. How about a mac app for Gmail, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, and literally millions more? From their help page, > Dig in to making real Mac apps from websites with Flotato. Looks like you can create apps of your websites. And it looks like it does it using Safari's engine.

It’s a pretty nifty app: you download it and you have “Flotato.app”. If you want a “Gmail” app, you copy Flotato.app, rename that copy to “Gmail.app” and open it. It will open Gmail, and the app icon changes to the Gmail logo.

So far this has worked consistently for more or less every site I tried.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#76

Post by c22 » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 9:35 PM UTC

I used to have this problem, I routinely keep well over 100 tabs open. Then I disabled default loading of javascript and now I never hear my fans.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#77

Post by coffeefirst » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

deanclatworthy wrote: post #50

The whole browser situation at the moment is so incredibly frustrating. I will NOT browse the internet without a fully-fledged adblocker - no pihole is not enough. This means pretty much only using Firefox - but I have about 10 tabs open at the moment, each using over 500mb of ram while idle. What on earth they are doing I don't know... and I find it very sluggish when playing video. Chrome is my daily browser, even…

The crazy thing to me is the ads aren't even the biggest problem anymore: it's clunky SPAs that load 1MB of js to save 10kb of HTML on navigation.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#78

Post by Leszek » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

(Disclaimer: V8 dev)

This post is unfortunately nonsense, because it's making a fundamental measurement error: not including renderer processes for Safari, and only measuring the browser process (which should be expected to be roughly O(1) memory in the number of tabs).

To the author's credit, they _are trying_ to include child processes - I'm not sure why, but `psrecord` seems to not (in local testing) include child processes for Safari even when the "--include-children" flag is passed. I guess it does for Chrome, for whatever reason.

I'm somewhat disappointed that the author, or half the comments on the post, didn't question these _wildly_ different results though...

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#79

Post by imbnwa » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 9:52 PM UTC

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #36

I use Safari because it's best by a mile on macOS for power consumption, but if you ever use a memory hungry site like Facebook for more than a few minutes it throws up a memory usage warning and everything becomes extremely slow and you get astronomical scroll jank. I'm guessing that's because it throws a hard cap on tab memory usage and if you go over that it thrashes wildly. So it respects your system, but in doin…

You got about 10 minutes to look at Reddit with the new design

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#80

Post by mobilio » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #36

I use Safari because it's best by a mile on macOS for power consumption, but if you ever use a memory hungry site like Facebook for more than a few minutes it throws up a memory usage warning and everything becomes extremely slow and you get astronomical scroll jank. I'm guessing that's because it throws a hard cap on tab memory usage and if you go over that it thrashes wildly. So it respects your system, but in doin…

This is the reason i was used in past two Facebook sites - mbasic. and m.

But Facebook surprises me with removing Messaging functionality from mobile sites. So i must use desktop site. Within 5 minutes fans starts howling...