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Browsers eating RAM

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Re: Browsers eating RAM

#131

Post by fire7000 »

young_unixer wrote: post #129
boring_twenties wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What ever happened to computers being at least somewhat usable when all RAM is in use? I seem to remember that being a pretty common condition back in the 90's. Things would get slow, sure, but not completely and utterly hosed. When this happened to me recently (unattended Firefox process used up all RAM) the machine was simply never able to recover, even after killing the offending process (thereby making 30GB or so…

For some reason, Linux is specially bad at working under load, both memory (too many applications & browser tabs open) and I/O (copying large files into USB drive).

How much performance are you expecting moving data over usb that should be moved over sata/sas

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#133

Post by franga2000 »

artifact_44 wrote: post #130

Unused ram is wasted ram.

It's not nearly that simple: power consumption, other processes, future processes... are all factors in deciding how much RAM to use and a userspace application simply can't know enough to decide that. And what do you do if it overestimates and you actually need that RAM for something else? The OS doesn't know enough to decide which pages to swap out and swapping isn't the right solution anyways as now your app thinks its cache is in memory but it's actually on the disk. But the OS can't just deallocate pages since it doesn't know which are important.

There's a pretty elegant solution to this that basically all OS use these days: the OS can use additional memory as a disk cache, since IO is still the biggest bottleneck on most systems. Apps can request a file to be cached too (see man 2 readahead), so there's no guessing involved and the app can cooperate with the OS instead of assuming it's the only thing that is or ever will be running and eating up qll resources accordingly.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#134

Post by pitay »

hnburnsy wrote: post #105

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 u…

For Firefox there is the 'Auto Tab Discard' addon. It has the ability to discard (unload) tabs after a certain amount of time or the number of non-active tabs is greater than a number, these are set in the addons options. Also has the ability to whitelist tabs, web sites, so that they never get unloaded.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#135

Post by sitharus »

bberenberg wrote: post #98
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?

From what I can tell - yes. Their app uses the standard Safari render processes, so they're only seeing the cost of the main process.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#136

Post by moksly »

CharlesW wrote: post #37
moksly wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a MacBook Pro 2016 everyday. Safari is easily the best browser memory and systems wise, but I still mainly use chrome because it’s better at addblocking and synchronises with my non-Mac devices. Chrome is fine though, as long as you don’t open 20+ tabs. Beyond that it’s not fine. I replaced Firefox with Chrome because it kept ranging from a great to terrible user experience with various updates. This is all ane…

> …I still mainly use chrome because it’s better at addblocking and synchronises with my non-Mac devices. (In case you're interested…) iCloud for Windows now does bookmarks and passwords sync. https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/icloud-for-windows-ov... For ad blocking, I really like 1Blocker. NextDNS is great as well.

I am, thank you.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#137

Post by bzzzt »

mayli wrote: post #89
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…

That's pretty much what I suspect from those numbers. Safari seems having constant memory usage no matter how many tabs you open. Unless its unloading inactive tabs from ram, there is no way Safari can save ram by using almost 0MB for new tabs.

Can confirm this as a Safari user: old tabs are reloaded sometimes. I guess it's related to memory pressure on the system, seems to be a lot more common on iOS (which of course runs on more RAM-constrained devices).

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#138

Post by fifilura »

DreamFlasher wrote: post #132

Article is missing the relevant browsers; Firefox, Brave and Opera.

Opera GX allows you to limit the amount of CPU and RAM the browser can use. Much of this is of course marketing, properly implementing this can be hard, but it would have been interesting to compare how well this works.

https://www.opera.com/gx#gx-control

"Need every ounce of power your machine can give you? No need to close your browser. GX Control lets you set limits on how much RAM, CPU and network usage your browser takes up."

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#139

Post by agumonkey »

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...

Reminds me I wanted to build a textonly proxy (like https://lite.cnn.com/en and similar) for all the web...

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#140

Post by lasagnaphil »

young_unixer wrote: post #129
boring_twenties wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What ever happened to computers being at least somewhat usable when all RAM is in use? I seem to remember that being a pretty common condition back in the 90's. Things would get slow, sure, but not completely and utterly hosed. When this happened to me recently (unattended Firefox process used up all RAM) the machine was simply never able to recover, even after killing the offending process (thereby making 30GB or so…

For some reason, Linux is specially bad at working under load, both memory (too many applications & browser tabs open) and I/O (copying large files into USB drive).

Is it because Linux is optimized more for server purposes rather than desktop ones (For example, when it comes to process scheduling)? I’m curious.
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