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Browsers eating RAM

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Re: Browsers eating RAM

#101

Post by saagarjha »

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…

Yep. Safari is good, but it's not magic. I suspect psrecord doesn't catch Safari processes because Safari sends them off to launchd because they get launched via XPC, while Chrome's subprocesses are "true" children.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#102

Post by least »

Klonoar wrote: post #87
imbnwa wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Safari + Old Reddit redirection is the way to go here. Now if only there was a way to calm Twitter down...

If you're logged into reddit, there's an option to just use the old layout which doesn't need an extension to redirect you.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#103

Post by robertoandred »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #63
llimllib wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer ubo, but have found adguard very tolerable for browsing with Safari

Adguard is an electron app that runs in the background of your machine. I found the whole idea of that apalling and uninstalled it.

You don’t have to keep the app open, it’s just for setting settings.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#104

Post by themanaknight »

Klonoar wrote: post #87
imbnwa wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Safari + Old Reddit redirection is the way to go here. Now if only there was a way to calm Twitter down...

Check out https://nitter.net/

I redirect all twitter links to nitter. For me nitter loads much faster.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#105

Post by hnburnsy »

Edge Insider Channel versions offer sleeping tabs functionality. I set mine to go to sleep after 5 minutes, works great.

>Using sleeping tabs on Microsoft Edge typically reduces memory usage by 32% on average. It also increases your battery life as a sleeping tab uses 37% less CPU on average than a non-sleeping tab. Although individual device performance varies depending on configuration and usage, we’ve heard from users that this decrease in resource and battery usage has improved their browsing experience.

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/12/09/sleeping-tabs...

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#106

Post by jml7c5 »

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…

Check `about:processes`. (I'm not sure if this is only available in Nightly right now.) It lists all processes, threads, and their memory + CPU usage.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#107

Post by Wowfunhappy »

A lot of people here are criticizing the methodology. That's fair, I don't know enough to weigh in.

But what I can say for sure is that in real-world use, on Mac, Safari absolutely feels lighter weight than other browsers. The fans spin up less, the battery lasts 30% longer, and other apps seem to be more responsive. I don't know if that's memory or cpu or what have you, but it's real.

You do pay a price in actual page-load times. Chrome absolutely has a small but noticeable edge in raw browsing speed.

I suspect this comes largely from Safari's tight integration with the rest of macOS. I recently had occasion to read a bit of Chromium's Cocoa UI code (to help the developer of https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy track down some bugs), and my very surface-level interpretation of what I saw could be summed up as "how can we get rid of macOS's native functionality and use our cross-platform stuff instead?"

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#108

Post by souprock »

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…

OK, but the situation still looks shameful. What exactly prohibits a web site from consuming all my RAM? I have never once seen a browser make a misbehaving site wait (frozen with no CPU) for me to confirm that sucking up more RAM is acceptable to me.

What happens instead is that I hit a wall of slowness, forcing me to press the power button and lose all my other work. It's not very gradual, I think due to the nature of the problem, so the browser needs to avoid getting into the situation. It's like UI latency follows a hyperbolic curve, running right up to infinity all of a sudden as the RAM runs out.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#109

Post by neolog »

souprock wrote: post #108
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…

OK, but the situation still looks shameful. What exactly prohibits a web site from consuming all my RAM? I have never once seen a browser make a misbehaving site wait (frozen with no CPU) for me to confirm that sucking up more RAM is acceptable to me. What happens instead is that I hit a wall of slowness, forcing me to press the power button and lose all my other work. It's not very gradual, I think due to the nature…

> browser make a misbehaving site wait

would be a nice operating system feature

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#110

Post by nabn »

powvans wrote: post #41
tpetry wrote: post #19

https://chromeisbad.com/ I did not have time yet to schow whether the claims are true but i found this when searching why i have insanely high windowserver cpu activity. Seems chrome on mac is heading into a strange direction. For normal browsing i use safari since a long time as the battery will last the longest compared to firefox and chrome. But the chrome developer tools are so damn good i can‘t get rid of it for…

I stumbled on this site last week and anecdotally I can confirm that disabling Keystone helps. I was driven to find answers after no longer being able to hear people on Zoom calls because of the fan noise from my 16" MBP. I got sick of having to wear noise cancelling headphones when Chrome and Zoom turn my laptop into a space heater. The Keystone thing though, it's not a panacea. It seems to fix the issue with Window…

How do you disable Keystone?
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