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Scalability

gregor-wagner.com

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Re: Scalability

#111

Post by rpearl »

scott_s wrote: 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.

Processes and threads are both schedulable entities in linux, which is a bit muddled, but when we talk about processes, it still implies a separate address space. That's the whole point of distinguishing them.

Of course the more sane model is for a process to be an address space container, and threads to be associated with a particular process, but when discussing them, that particular implementation detail is moot.

Re: Scalability

#112

Post by [deleted] »

dspillett wrote: post #90
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 tend to have several windows with sevaral tabs open for different categories: things to send to people next time they are online, personal techie things I intend to read when I get a minute, work related similar, and so on. Yes I could use bookmarks and such for these, but I find this a more immediate reminder. Every now and then I scan round these windows and close off things that have slipped into irrelevance or…

[deleted]

Re: Scalability

#113

Post by sjs »

dspillett wrote: post #90
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 tend to have several windows with sevaral tabs open for different categories: things to send to people next time they are online, personal techie things I intend to read when I get a minute, work related similar, and so on. Yes I could use bookmarks and such for these, but I find this a more immediate reminder. Every now and then I scan round these windows and close off things that have slipped into irrelevance or…

I can't imagine triaging 200 tabs on any kind of regular basis. Just thinking about closing that many tabs feels really good. Do it man, get rid of them! Free yourself! Bookmark things or send to Instapaper/Read it later and archive things you haven't read in a week. Don't let it pile up. Don't feel obligated to read or otherwise handle each page.

Maybe you don't feel bogged down but I feel bogged down for you :)

Re: Scalability

#114

Post by dredmorbius »

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..

I'll do similar.

Tree-mode tabs help a lot (I'm still looking for a good Chrome plugin for this), "Tree Style Tabs" for FF5. Since trees group related tabs (I've got a subtree open for HN right now), and collapse, it helps to manage them.

As with grandparent poster, I'll have several windows, across several desktops, task-oriented. News, mail, site monitoring, research, reference(s) for languages / tools, etc.

200 tabs is probably a high count, but well over 100 is very doable.

Re: Scalability

#115

Post by cbs »

kylek wrote: post #101
cbs wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 operate similarly. I have my FF set to open up the previous session on start (though I don't usually close FF). Tend to have 70-100 tabs open always. I recommend a vertical tab addon (I use Tree Style Tabs) else you'll wear out your scroll wheel on the tab bar :)

I recommend a vertical tab addon (I use Tree Style Tabs) else you'll wear out your scroll wheel on the tab bar :)

Thats exactly the extension I use! I'm really happy with it, it gave me the ah-ha moment that working with multiple tabs doesn't have to be prohibitivly painful. Thanks to it I decided to change my taskbar to be vertical too and haven't looked back. It makes for more wasted space if you're not busy, but is worth it, as UI wisdom tells us scanning horizontally is a lot harder for the user than vertically (and thats when everything fits on the screen).

Re: Scalability

#116

Post by dredmorbius »

polyfractal wrote: post #94
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.

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.

There's TabSense, which can give you a tree visualization, but the main tablist is still horizontal across the top of the screen. Weak.

Re: Scalability

#117

Post by sjs »

Flam wrote: post #99
cbs wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We don't "multi-task all 30 open tabs at the same time" whatever that means. Just like you can have many apps running but maybe only one or two windows visible at any time, you can have many tabs open and only focus on one or two at a time.

For those of us who write software being able to discretely switch to a certain doc with ctrl-tab or ctrl/cmd-# is much quicker and efficient than navigating N times throughout the day just to reduce the # of tabs.

If I'm working on a Twilio web app I might refer to the Twilio docs, Ruby docs, twilio-ruby source, and some web related docs all throughout the day (HTML/JavaScript/CSS). Oh yeah, don't forget the JavaScript library docs. Why look them up each time you need them? Open them at the beginning, close when you're done work and that's that.

Your tab related OCD shouldn't enter into our workflow ;-)

Re: Scalability

#118

Post by cbs »

onedognight wrote: post #92
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.

Like everything the awesomebar has done since 1.5, at first that feature seemed kind of annoying to me, but now it has become super handy.

Re: Scalability

#119

Post by dredmorbius »

Flam wrote: post #99
cbs wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's called context / state.

The more state I can leave up on my desktop, the better.

If there were better management within the browser -- non-visible tabs were eventually unloaded, with any page-state (forms data, etc.) saved -- then you wouldn't have the memory bloat problems that occur.

The thing is that it's a very large virtual workspace to spread things out over. So long as it's organized, it's really useful.

Look to movies especially of researchers in the 1970s or 1980s who'd spread clippings and papers over all horizontal surfaces in an office, tape/pin them to a wall, etc. You want to be able to scan quickly through the space at eye-speed, not have to dig into files / organizers / storage / regenerate the information every time you want to look at it.

It's why you'd rather have a large monitor -- you can strew windows over it and see more, rather than have to manage windows and go through them repeatedly.

Re: Scalability

#120

Post by pbz »

hack_edu wrote: post #105
pbz wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you on Gingerbread? The keyboards before 2.3 are awful.

Yes, I'm on 2.3.4. I started with 2.1, the keyboard itself was OK. Sometime around 2.2 it started crashing, about every other day. With 2.3 it crashes even more.

The particular problem I had above was not due to crashing. As I was typing, the suggestion bar was pushing the text that I was typing out of sight. So I had to constantly fight with it to actually see what I typed. When taping to move the cursor, it was actually trying to make a selection, but only sometimes. Using the wheel to achieve the same made it constantly jump.

The worst part was that when you reach the end of the text box you cannot scroll below and see what you typed. Well, you can, for a few seconds then it takes you back. You can type, however, but don't get to see what you typed. It's like typing blindfolded. I had to just post the message and go back and edit it.

How something so basic passed QA is beyond my comprehension. Here's one of the threads about the keyboard crashes: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=15311

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