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Browsers eating RAM

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Re: Browsers eating RAM

#161

Post by yarcob »

josephg wrote: post #113
topspin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In Firefox reddit (new version) will sit at about 50% of a core on my laptop. Simple mouse hover effects on the page lag about half a second behind my actual mouse cursor. YouTube (while not playing a video) will use about 15% of my cpu, even when idle in a background tab. I’m not sure if the bug is in Firefox or in the sites, but it’s awful. I don’t understand how these issues don’t get fixed immediately. I thought…

New Reddit is almost unusable for me in Safari as well, it amazes me how they are so popular when the experience in the browser is so bad. (old.reddit.com kinda works, but lots of embedded things like slideshows or videos are a really bad experience)

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#162

Post by dannyw »

boring_twenties wrote: post #115
souprock wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Back then, needing to smartly manage RAM (i.e. reserve space for what you REALLY needed; manage your own requests otherwise) was done.

Now, not so much. Dev machines rarely run out of RAM anyway.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#163

Post by antoniogermano »

readittwice wrote: post #55

Those numbers don't make sense to me, it claims that Safari would use 73M of memory with both Twitter and Gmail. But locally on my machine I see that Activity Monitor already reports 490M of memory usage just for the Gmail process of Safari alone. The Twitter login page also already needs 90M. Can someone check as well?

I’ve tested Safari many times before comparing it to other browsers (and correctly including child processes) and it has always beaten every other browser by using varying degrees of resources less than its competitors. Sometimes a surprisingly large number, sometimes not too much.

But there’s something people need to take into account as well: there’s only so much browser developers can do to optimize the browser. Website developers need to do their part as well. And Google is by far the worst offender in this regard. Facebook isn’t much better.

Most Google-owned webpages you visit are going to use at least 500MB on Safari or 800MB on Chrome. This is nonsense! If they were to develop a native app with exactly the same features it would take at most 250MB of RAM for the largest pages (such as large spreadsheets) and it would be a lot faster.

Compare Google and Facebook webpages to almost any other webpage and you will see they use too much RAM. People are unfortunately getting used to thinking “oh, I have 8 tabs open, that’s too many” when in fact it shouldn’t be.

I know I’m a tab hoarder, I don’t deny that. But using Safari currently have over 13 windows open, each with at least 25 tabs, not to mention plenty of native software running and still have a very fast and functional Mac. It’s not like I have 2TB of RAM either: 16GB of RAM is more than enough to do that. About a year ago (before I upgraded) I did pretty much the same thing with a 8GB RAM 2013 Mac and still didn’t have issues.

The only tabs Safari ever tells me it has reloaded because it’s using too many resources are Google-owned websites. This doesn’t happen with any other website at all from the hundreds of tabs I have open.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#164

Post by dannyw »

airpoint wrote: post #94
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.

Still not as good as uBlock origin in terms of blocking quality.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#165

Post by dannyw »

least wrote: post #102
Klonoar wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That setting seems to disable itself every 4-8 weeks.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#166

Post by inthewoods »

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Microsoft Edge here. No dog in the fight (I don't work for Microsoft), but I've found Edge uses significantly less RAM and CPU - my fan rarely goes on now except for Google Hangouts. There was a point after upgrading to Big Sur that the fan was spinning a lot with Edge (or for other reasons), but that seems to have been solved.

The other thing to mention is that the functionality provided by Flotato can be mostly duplicated in Edge by just creating Edge apps for common webpages. I've done this with GMail, Youtube TV, Youtube Music, etc. There are sometime limitations (you can't have Outlook as an app and Outlook Calendar as an app), but it's pretty solid. These apps seems to bring down RAM and CPU usage, but I haven't measured formally.

Bonus: I have setup two different profiles in Edge - one for work and one for personal. What's nice is that if you create an app like Gmail under your personal profile, links from that app will always open in the associated profile - in this case my personal profile. This is, for me, absolutely groundbreaking but that's for me. In the past I've tried to use standalone email programs and it would constantly drive me crazy when I had, say, a personal and work inboxes, and then I click on a link in my personal email and it opens in a work browser window because that was the last one I clicked.

I've been testing Flotato and it seems really buggy - couldn't get many apps to even run.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#167

Post by boring_twenties »

souprock wrote: post #149
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…

It was nice when the OS was 64-bit and multi-threaded, but the browser was not. The browser couldn't grab more than 1 CPU and 4 GiB.

Haha, yeah. I mean you can still use cgroups or something to accomplish this, right?

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#168

Post by boring_twenties »

lasagnaphil wrote: post #140
young_unixer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really seeing how being unable to recover without Alt-SysRq is any better on the server

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#169

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

josephg wrote: post #113
topspin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In Firefox reddit (new version) will sit at about 50% of a core on my laptop. Simple mouse hover effects on the page lag about half a second behind my actual mouse cursor. YouTube (while not playing a video) will use about 15% of my cpu, even when idle in a background tab. I’m not sure if the bug is in Firefox or in the sites, but it’s awful. I don’t understand how these issues don’t get fixed immediately. I thought…

I have the exact same issues you’re describing - but only on my third monitor that’s attached to its own GPU. - I’m still investigating, but I think it’s a PCIe issue.

Also, do you have an NVMe or Optane SSD attached?

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#170

Post by smaudet »

dahart wrote: post #154
souprock wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an 8 GiB machine with an SSD. I open lots of tabs, in lots of browser windows, on lots of virtual desktops, but so what if I do? It's still unacceptable to lock up. If I visit a specific web site with a memory abusive app, the browser is supposed to protect me. It's the same as any security hole. Malicious web sites aren't supposed to crash my computer. Yes, I'm still blaming the browser. It's the browser's job…

If it’s unacceptable to lock up, then turn off virtual memory. Swap is not a security hole, it’s a feature doing exactly what it was designed for. Swap is the explicit design tradeoff of the system you bought, and it’s the default behavior because most people prefer that their system work slowly to a system that stops working. Fortunately it’s an optional feature, and you can turn it off. > I open lots of tabs, in lo…

My god - what a privileged twat.

"100$ in RAM" - maybe learn what its like to live on most of the planet instead of your tiny walled garden.

There is a way to limit this, and also to provide feedback to the user about what is going on such that the system never swaps or freezes. Instead we get lazy intellectual excuses from the likes of such as yourself.

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