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Scalability

gregor-wagner.com

51–60 of 165 posts

Re: Scalability

#51
My firefox browsing way is to open every link in new tab. Going back and forth in same tab caches every page browsed in the tab so it increases memory consumption. In this I usually end up opening 40+ tabs. But tab management is super easy with firefox thanks to tree style tab extension. Even 40+ tabs opened my firefox memory consumption is much less than chrome opened 40+ tab (which is unmanageble due to shrinked size of tab bar)

Re: Scalability

#52
Chrome lately has been really slow for me and GIF performance is terrible (but I guess this is a webkit problem).

Re: Scalability

#53
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.

Agreed, I rarely have more than a handful of tabs open. Less often, but not unfrequently, I don't have a browser open at all. If I want to (re)read something later, I use instapaper.

Re: Scalability

#54
Interesting. This doesn't match my experience at all.

When I have lots of tabs open in Firefox, there are occasional pauses where everything, including the browser's chrome, freezes. I've never noticed these pauses in Chrome.

And yes, I do open hundreds of tabs. (As a side note, Chrome's far smaller minimum tab size is a major bonus for my usage, simply because I can see more tabs without scrolling the tab bar).

Re: Scalability

#55
post #23

Windows, Linux or OSX? I'm curious because on Linux, threads and processes are essentially the same thing - they're the same data structure in the kernel. But as far as I know, that is not true on Windows. I also find his conclusion a bit disingenuous: I never have more than ~10 tabs open. I'm more interested in the performance around my actual usage, not an order of magnitude more.

How is it disingenuous at all? It clearly specifies the conditions and re-emphasizes in the conclusion that the analysis was done based on which browser handles having a large number of tabs open better. Also, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I routinely have more than 100 tabs open. So this analysis is clearly relevant and interesting to me. Edit: proof-reading.

Re: Scalability

#56
post #18

Opera's doing just fine. As I am writing this, Opera has all 150 tabs open and still feels snappy. ~1.5GB memory and ~30% CPU (currently). I could not measure the time but it was well below 10min.

Opera has always been a performer when low specs and lots of tabs were involved, cruising with 50+ tabs when Firefox and Chrome choked my system at 10+ tabs.

Re: Scalability

#57
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.

> How is it even feasible to find a specific tab without doing a time consuming linear search?

Firefox searches open tabs in the awesomebar; selecting one of those entries switches to the tab.

Re: Scalability

#58
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…

Your browsing style is very much same as mine. I suppose you are using firefox with vimperator + tree style tab. If you have a fear of restarting the browser again then install bartab[1] extension and forget the fear. It unloads the tabs from memory, so memory consumption is too low and restarting browser takes little time.

[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab/

Re: Scalability

#59
Just out curiosity, how do Chrome users deal with multiple tabs? I always felt like Chrome's tab bar became useless when I was going through my RSS feeds, because tabs shrunk to nothing. Side tabs is kind of a solution, but the lack of hierarchy (and IMO, ugliness) makes it an unattractive solution. In FF, I can have 52 tabs open (just checke) with TreeStyleTab and all them be visible. Chrome gets unwieldy after about 15 or so last I checked.

Re: Scalability

#60
post #48
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?

> The real question is whether you would ever have that many tabs open, and how much memory do you have on your desktop? I have 60 tabs open now (in FF), and this is after closing most of them, on a 32-bit system with 4GB of RAM. I regularly hit over 200 tabs when browsing.

200 tabs.. how is that possible? Do you ctrl+click on every possible links on every page?! I'm actually really surprised. I, too, can't stand more than 5-6..
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