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Scalability

gregor-wagner.com

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Re: Scalability

#31

Post by acangiano »

narkee wrote: post #24

Anyone care to share how their usage patterns lead to having hundreds of tabs open at a single time? How is it even feasible to find a specific tab without doing a time consuming linear search? I rarely have more than 4-5 tabs open at a time, so I'm honestly curious.

I'll give you one case when this is useful. Let's say that you have to select 20 titles out of hundreds of books. [1] If your browser allows it, it would be convenient to open N amazon links (for N in (100,999]), and then eliminate books as you go through them by closing tabs. In the end you may remain with 20 books or so you shortlisted.

1. I have a similar usecase for http://anynewbooks.com, even though the process is quite different thanks to a ranking algorithm that preliminarily sort the books in a sensible way.

Re: Scalability

#32

Post by mgkimsal »

Chrome also gets to a usable state much slower than FF for me (osx10.6 - mbp 13"). The window opens faster, but it just hangs for a heck of a long time (10-15 seconds). FF is slower to paint its first window, but is usable much faster overall (meaning, I can type in to the web address bar).

Re: Scalability

#33

Post by AndyZ3 »

narkee wrote: post #24

Anyone care to share how their usage patterns lead to having hundreds of tabs open at a single time? How is it even feasible to find a specific tab without doing a time consuming linear search? I rarely have more than 4-5 tabs open at a time, so I'm honestly curious.

I use Firefox with Tree Style Tab. Tree Style Tab is actually the reason why I never switched to Chromium, as it IS impossible to keep more than a few tabs organized without such a plugin in my opinion.

Having many tabs opened at once and being able to keep them out of sight with Tree Style Tab makes it much easier for me to keep my browsing session organized and stops me from accidently closing websites I might need later/tomorrow. Bookmarks on the other hand never really worked for me the right way, so instead of bookmarking a link, I just keep it open in the background until I don't need it anymore, and my favorite sites stay open all the time.

I also run multiple instance of firefox to seperate my browsing sessions (private/work/social/etc), as I don't want my google searches or cookies to mix, and I tend not to reboot my machine but to just use hibernate. When I have to reboot because of updates, I use BarTab, which makes it possible to only reload specific tabs when a firefox session was closed.

Re: Scalability

#34

Post by thesteamboat »

narkee wrote: post #24

Anyone care to share how their usage patterns lead to having hundreds of tabs open at a single time? How is it even feasible to find a specific tab without doing a time consuming linear search? I rarely have more than 4-5 tabs open at a time, so I'm honestly curious.

I must admit to currently having 280 tabs open. In my case, I open a bunch of things I intend to read (by browsing reddit or the like) and defer the reading of them indefinitely.

In practice, most of the tabs are `legacy' tabs that I don't use, but which I still retain some nominal interest in when I go clean out the tabs every couple months or so. These tabs range from youtube videos that I don't want to forget, to tips for Vim, Wikipedia articles, blog posts on machine learning, instructions for DIY haptic compasses...

About 1/3 can be traced to one or two websites with interesting articles that I intend to read in depth (at some point).

Re: Scalability

#35

Post by sid0 »

petegrif wrote: post #21

I figured that around 150 was an unlikely use case but see from the comments that some people are using approx 100 tabs. I can't imagine doing that. What kind of real world use cases do people have for such a huge number of tabs? And how do they navigate efficiently?

Usually research, when you need to sift through a large number of pages and look for something relevant. I find myself having 200+ tabs open when I'm in that sort of mode.

Re: Scalability

#36

Post by beagle3 »

scott_s wrote: post #22
silon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But you can forbid it to access other memory areas for security Not in C/++ in any standard definition of "thread".

Sure you can. Use the mprotect() system call: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/mprotect.ht...

mprotect() doesn't let different threads have different read/write permissions to a page. You need different processes to achieve that.

Re: Scalability

#37

Post by sgift »

xutopia wrote: post #29
petegrif wrote: post #21

I figured that around 150 was an unlikely use case but see from the comments that some people are using approx 100 tabs. I can't imagine doing that. What kind of real world use cases do people have for such a huge number of tabs? And how do they navigate efficiently?

I've seen tab enthusiasts. They are incapable of tracking which tab they already have open and reopen the same one over and over again.

Not really, I have about 100 tabs open at the moment and each one points to a different page. Regarding the "real world usage" for this: Pages I read every day, pages I've opened and intend to read if there's time and pages I read at the moment. Works fine, thanks.

Maybe this is also a function of browser capability: If your browser crashes or becomes unusable with many tabs you won't open many.

Re: Scalability

#38

Post by ootachi »

mootothemax wrote: post #4

It makes me a bit suspicious that a Canary build of Chrome is used. I understand that when a new feature is highlighted in a nightly build of Firefox, it's right to show it off - but why not do so against the latest version of Chrome - or even a Dev build? At least those two have been tested first ;)

Would you honestly prefer it if browser manufacturers compared pre-release versions to shipping versions? Seems to me that would be far worse.

Re: Scalability

#39

Post by iliis »

AndyZ3 wrote: post #33
narkee wrote: post #24

Anyone care to share how their usage patterns lead to having hundreds of tabs open at a single time? How is it even feasible to find a specific tab without doing a time consuming linear search? I rarely have more than 4-5 tabs open at a time, so I'm honestly curious.

I use Firefox with Tree Style Tab. Tree Style Tab is actually the reason why I never switched to Chromium, as it IS impossible to keep more than a few tabs organized without such a plugin in my opinion. Having many tabs opened at once and being able to keep them out of sight with Tree Style Tab makes it much easier for me to keep my browsing session organized and stops me from accidently closing websites I might need…

That's one of my favorite plugins too. In combination with something like Session Manager it's really useful.

To give some stats: I normally have around 30-40 tabs open, my peak so far was at 97. Yes, there's even a plugin for that ;) ("Tab Counter").

Re: Scalability

#40

Post by uiet »

tytso wrote: post #5

Performance is the side-effect, not the cause. The cause is the fact that chrome uses separate processes both for security, and so if one tab crashes, you don't lose them all. The fact that it uses more memory is a design tradeoff (although with shared text pages it's not as bad as one might think). The real question is whether you would ever have that many tabs open, and how much memory do you have on your desktop?

Browser performance really matters for web automation, web testing projects with tools like imacros or watir.
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