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Browsers eating RAM

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Re: Browsers eating RAM

#91

Post by mayli »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #71
lucideer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

300MB onload, dropped to 240MB after idling for few minutes. Are you sure it's using less than 100MB? in comparison with the post, it takes about 500MB ram, which is weird for such simple webpage. This HN page takes 40MB.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#92

Post by lhorie »

coffeefirst wrote: post #77
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.

No, ads are a big problem too, let's not pretend they aren't a horrible blight. With that said, it is a bit ridiculous that webpages load MBs of JS (SPA-related or not), and that browsers load hundreds of MBs to JIT said Javascript...

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#93

Post by estaseuropano »

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…

Im confused, your post says Firefox is the only possible option but chrome the daily driver?

I use Firefox on windows and Ubuntu and yds it eats ram but I don't really experience any sluggishness or issues from this.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#94

Post by airpoint »

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…

Wipr is what you’re after. “Native” adblocker for Safari. I’ve switched to it from uBlock years ago and not looked back since.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#95

Post by forgotmypw17 »

c22 wrote: post #76

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.

This is my strategy as well. I use browsers which allow selective enabling of JS and avoid sites which require JS to display content.

In the process, I've found a strong correlation between quality of content and quality of interface accessibility. When a site makes me jump through hoops to view the content, be it enabling JS, video DRM, paywalls, or modal overlays, the content is typically of low quality as well, and I feel like I actually gain more from avoiding it than from going through the trouble of accessing it.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#96

Post by topspin »

coffeefirst wrote: post #77
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.

I know when I've clicked on a medium.com link because my CPU fan spins up chewing on all the framework junk.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#97

Post by sfink »

roblabla wrote: post #27
The_rationalist wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? If it's allocated to chrome it cannot be reused by other software. Even if it's allocated but unused

You absolutely can allocate memory without using up any backing resources. On Linux (which is where I have experience, but I assume macos works similarly), even after mapping some memory, it won't be backed by any physical memory (e.g. RAM) until you actually write there. And you can mmap files into your address space, meaning you can place a huge file you can access through memory, but it's not actually taking any R…

And that doesn't even get into decommitting and related things, where you mark memory that you have used as no longer needed but still "there" in a variety of different senses. Not to mention the extra fun on OSX where you can mark something as unused, but OSX makes you pinkie-promise to let it know before you start using it again. If you don't, it works, but the accounting becomes inaccurate. "Fun".

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#98

Post by bberenberg »

Leszek wrote: post #78

(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…

This is really interesting feedback, but you didn't respond to the Flotato numbers (since this is an ad for their software). Is the dev tricking themselves into thinking they're doing well because they're measuring their own app usage incorrectly?

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#99

Post by mccr8 »

neogodless wrote: post #61
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…

I went to check my Firefox memory usage on Windows 10 (two tabs, extensions include ublock, facebook, bitwarden, contrast and multi-account containers) but I saw something unexpected. https://imgur.com/a/UJnV7ak Adding up the RAM totals 671.7MB on a 16GB device. But why do I have one Firefox with 4 sub-processes, and 3 (no 4) additional lone Firefox processes? I think the 4 background processes must be extensions in…

If you go to about:memory and click on "Measure" you can get some information about what is in memory. In addition to web pages, Firefox uses child processes for things like the new tab page, extensions, talking to the GPU, and some other things. It also uses a preallocated process like another commenter suggested, to speed up opening a new page.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#100

Post by chrismorgan »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #71
lucideer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Four years ago, I found Gmail to tend to use 80–200MB in Firefox, mostly in the lower half of that range. Certainly I found the figures in this test utterly unbelievable for this reason; Safari ain’t lighter on memory than Firefox, let alone that much.

But also for reference, it’s not like something of Gmail’s complexity has to use that much memory. Fastmail provides equivalent functionality minus chat in a 10–15MB budget, and you can add calendars and contacts (which are separate in Google land) and still keep it to 16–25MB.

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