Scalability • Hacker News Board

Re: Scalability

#91

Post by pbz » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 2:35 PM UTC

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?

I have seen that claim before, but in my experience the few times Chrome crashed I had to close the whole thing. The individual tabs may have been working, but they definitely weren't responding, or at least I wasn't able to get to them as the wrapping process seems to have crashed. (Beside the point: the Android keyboard is worst piece of @#%$@ I have ever had to work with)

Re: Scalability

#92

Post by onedognight » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 2:37 PM UTC

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.

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

Firefox's awesome bar searches open tabs. So, "C-l ann" gets me to this tab as "annihilate" is in the title of this post.

Re: Scalability

#93

Post by hack_edu » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 2:47 PM UTC

pbz wrote: post #91

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?

I have seen that claim before, but in my experience the few times Chrome crashed I had to close the whole thing. The individual tabs may have been working, but they definitely weren't responding, or at least I wasn't able to get to them as the wrapping process seems to have crashed. (Beside the point: the Android keyboard is worst piece of @#%$@ I have ever had to work with)

The Android browser is not Chrome as addressed in the article.

Re: Scalability

#94

Post by polyfractal » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 2:50 PM UTC

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.

Chiming in to say that ~60 tabs is not uncommon for me either. The Tree Style tab extension for Firefox is amazing and allows me to organize tabs into groups. Some groups are on the "to read" list that I don't get to for a couple days.

It is also the main reason why I can't/won't switch to Chrome - no Tree Style tabs.

Re: Scalability

#95

Post by pbz » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 2:52 PM UTC

hack_edu wrote: post #93

pbz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen that claim before, but in my experience the few times Chrome crashed I had to close the whole thing. The individual tabs may have been working, but they definitely weren't responding, or at least I wasn't able to get to them as the wrapping process seems to have crashed. (Beside the point: the Android keyboard is worst piece of @#%$@ I have ever had to work with)

The Android browser is not Chrome as addressed in the article.

I know that, I said Android keyboard, not browser. I'm typing this on a vanila Android phone, and the level of pain I had to go through just to type the text above is ridiculous. This is not even alpha quality, it's pathetic.

Re: Scalability

#96

Post by ori_b » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 2:52 PM UTC

zobzu wrote: post #67

ori_b wrote: post #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).

you need Firefox 8 to feel the improvements

Perhaps, but if this test is accurate, Chrome has also gotten far, far worse in recent versions. I find that surprising.

Re: Scalability

#97

Post by chrislomax » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 2:53 PM UTC

zobzu wrote: post #16

chrislomax wrote: post #14

I recently switched from Firefox to Chrome after their appalling release of Firefox 4 & 5. 5 Is better than 4, but only slightly. In most cases, Chrome out performs Firefox now and it's a shame that I had to switch from Firefox. Although these are real world statistics you encountered, I still think that Firefox needs to buck their ideas up and start releasing more stable versions.

The version in the story is Firefox nightly aka Firefox 8. There are many changes from Firefox 5 to 8. Since they adopted the rapid release, Firefox 8 won't take forever to be stable, but it will still take a few month.

I'm much aware of their recent release schedule changes, I just hope that they are not sacrificing stability for increased version release. Firefox used to be about testing and stability rather than who has the bigger version number.

4 was an insult to me, crashing all the time and so slow, pathetic in the terms of a browser, I would have rather used IE for a couple of months whilst that was released and that's saying something

Re: Scalability

#98

Post by yock » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 3:00 PM UTC

pbz wrote: post #95

hack_edu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Android browser is not Chrome as addressed in the article.

I know that, I said Android keyboard, not browser. I'm typing this on a vanila Android phone, and the level of pain I had to go through just to type the text above is ridiculous. This is not even alpha quality, it's pathetic.

Use SwiftKey. http://www.swiftkey.net/

Re: Scalability

#99

Post by Flam » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 3:06 PM UTC

cbs wrote: post #85

Flam wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

W.T.F. I can't go over 6 without feeling messy.

How you feel doesn't really matter when you're doing anything other than idle browsing. This morning I had about 30 tabs open when I came into work, all documentation or reference of some sort that I will use in the next few hours. And thats about the lowest I ever get, if I'm looking up something new to me or complex it will easily shoot over 100.

I'm afraid I disagree. There's no way you could multi-task all 30 open tabs at the same time. Read what you need and close the tab when you're done. Leave only the topmost page of the documentation open so you can find your way back down again if you need to. You should be able to tell whether a page has value to you or not within the first 30 seconds of skimming through it. Do you open every result on google for the first 3 pages of all your searches or something? Baffling.

Re: Scalability

#100

Post by Shenglong » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 3:09 PM UTC

eleitl wrote: post #83

d0m wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

I also carry around 200+ tabs, and 100+ of these I use periodically. Every now and then I cycle through these, and eliminate chaff, and add new ones, so the total number remains about constant. I've also switched back from Chrome to Firefox because Chrome doesn't scale (nor does it have all the extensions).

How do you even navigate through 200 tabs?