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Scalability

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Re: Scalability

#71

Post by CoryMathews »

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 usually run around 50 (44 right now) and have them grouped with opera's tab grouping so it does not normally feel like a lot.

Most of these come from sites like this one. I will go down the home page and open every article I want to read as well as its comments page (middle clicking). Thats easily 20ish tabs. These tabs will then stay open most of the day as I slowly read them.

Then I have some that are used sort of as a todo list. These can be a page where I need to fill out a form, read an article, etc.

I also have a bunch of tabs based on a group. For instance since I do a lot of web programming I may be working on 1 site and have 1-8 tabs associated with it, but then I need to switch to another site and open another set for it, but I don't close the previous until I am done with the site.

Then I have the normal "apps", pinned tabs or whatever they are called. Usually just 2 though, gmail and grooveshark. However sometimes it grows a bit more to add calendar, docs and whatever is is needed.

Add it all up and its quite a lot of tabs, and they just add up quickly. But with the ability to place tabs on the left of the screen and group them its easily manageable. I couldn't work with this many tabs without those 2 features.

Re: Scalability

#72

Post by icebraining »

d0m wrote: post #60
rmccue wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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..

Personally, I often keep 40 to 80 tabs open - I just keep what I'm reading open. Right now, I'm reading about semantic data, then there's the RDF tools for Python. Now I'm taking a break, so I have GReader, HN and a couple dozen articles/comments pages from that.

It's just a way of keeping the 'flow' of a browsing session in the browser itself, so you don't have to keep all that in (mental) memory.

I do use Firefox, which works fine even in my 2GB laptop and with a bunch of extensions installed.

Re: Scalability

#73

Post by jmcqk6 »

rmccue wrote: post #48
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?

> 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.

Another question is how badly that leaks memory?

Re: Scalability

#75

Post by icebraining »

Blarat wrote: post #45
bambax wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The limit is found pretty soon on older machines; while the OP tests on a Mac with 8GB of Ram, on my main machine I have only 2GB of Ram, and Chrome becomes unresponsive after ~10 tabs opened. I didn't think Firefox would be better but if it is, I might go back to it!

I have 1.5GB of RAM and I usually have ~15-20 tabs open without any performance hits on chrome, (including Eclipse, Skype, filezilla calc, evernote etc etc open). Maybe there's something wrong with your install?

Same here; right now I have FF open with 30 tabs and Chromium with 10 (including Angry Birds, installed version) in a 2GB laptop and it's fine.

Re: Scalability

#76

Post by ck2 »

But I bet chrome is smoother - firefox goes crazy if I have one tab doing something heavy duty, all the others are sluggish. Still sticking with firefox though because of some plugins.

Re: Scalability

#77

Post by cdr »

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 have about 180 tabs open right now on my desktop. They're spread across multiple windows and multiple Firefox profiles, grouped by task. It's not at all hard to find a specific tab, and I use multi-row tabs so they're not tiny.

Re: Scalability

#78

Post by access_denied »

derefr wrote: post #28
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'm guessing people are mostly just using them as a reading queue. (Middle-click everything, then Ctrl+W to advance.) Of course, tabs aren't actually built for this (mostly; I think Apple has realized that people do this, as the newest Safari seems to unload the render state for tabs that have been in the background of a window for a while; everything reflows when you actually switch to the tab.)

What were tabs built for then?

Re: Scalability

#79

Post by icebraining »

tptacek wrote: post #68
zobzu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats not true. FF 3.6 and before that did not compartment it per tab. Likewise for IE, but they're per process like Chrome now. Not sure about other webkit browsers and Opera, it's likely other wekbit browsers (except safari) do not do that.

I can't follow what you're trying to say here. I'm probably just misunderstanding you. Someone suggested that Firefox had memory segmentation, and just did it with threads. That's obviously not accurate. Then you said, "they have it, just with javascript objects". What mainstream browser allows javascript in a tab to access objects in any other page, let alone another tab?

Depends on what JS it is. Obviously websites can't, but a huge part of Firefox is coded in JS, which runs with high privileges. It's perfectly possible that tab specific trusted JS code (including possibly extensions code) wasn't compartmentalized and now is.

Re: Scalability

#80

Post by pushingbits »

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.

Opera has tab stacks where you drop tabs on top of each other, which groups them together. Then you can collapse and expand the groups.

I don't use it that much (mostly because there are no shortcuts and command line interface for adding to a stack or expand / collapse), but it is nice sometimes. I might do some research for a blog post, end up with 5 sites that I know I will need to consult when I write it, and just put them in a stack and have it sit there (collapsed, so it doesn't take up much space) until I do write it.

Having said that, I rarely get over 50 (usually in the morning after clearing out my feeds, or when programming against some API / library, when I open lots of documentation pages).

Once I get to the point where I can't see the favicons anymore, I start looking for something to close.

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