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Scalability

gregor-wagner.com

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Re: Scalability

#141

Post by Perceval »

doctoboggan wrote: post #137
Perceval wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you're on 4chan and there's a creative thread with a bunch of images. Threads can reach 150 images before they max out. You could use the Linky extension to "Open All Image Links in Tabs" and you would instantly be up over 100 tabs. That's just one use case, but there are certainly many others.

There is a google chrome extension for 4chan that will let you preload all images or open all images inline. It also auto fetches new replys and loads them inline aswell. I am on my phone right now so I can't find what it is called, but IIRC it was the most popular and highest rated 4chan extension.

I have that Chrome extension and a similar one for Safari.

I just dislike opening images inline or all loaded into one separate tab, because then it turns saving individual images into a mouse-driven task rather than a keyboard-driven task.

As an aside: what do you use to browse Hacker News on your phone?

Re: Scalability

#142

Post by Perceval »

d0m wrote: post #126
Perceval wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you're on 4chan and there's a creative thread with a bunch of images. Threads can reach 150 images before they max out. You could use the Linky extension to "Open All Image Links in Tabs" and you would instantly be up over 100 tabs. That's just one use case, but there are certainly many others.

Instead of 200 pages of images, get on a real site and open only one tab with a video ;-)

There are plenty of image threads that are not porn. Especially if you forego /b/ for the work-safe topical boards.

Re: Scalability

#143

Post by pbiggar »

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 virtual desktops ("Spaces" on Mac), and typically have 16 open, with one window per desktop. Each "desktop" represents one unit of work, whether that's a project, or bugs that I work on in parallel (waiting for reviews, etc).

In general, each window starts with one tab, but as I do more research into something, more and more tabs open. I religiously close tabs I'm not using, and the ones I keep open tend to be API references and similar.

I also use tabs as a TODO list, so any open tab is something I have to do. Closing them means my system breaks.

This would all be completely unmanageable without a few optimizations:

- TreeStyleTabs makes managing 25-30 tabs per window manageable. I almost never have more than that.

- Firefox Nightlies use considerably less memory than the release version, mostly due to the MemShrink effort within Mozilla (where I work)

- I set browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs to 0, to prevent a restart opening all my tabs and sinking memory into windows that aren't in my regular rotation.

Even so, Firefox typically uses 1.5-2GB of RSS, and slows to a crawl after a few days. This is due to fragmentation, and I'm working on fixing it.

Re: Scalability

#144

Post by pbiggar »

rajpaul wrote: post #125

Interesting test, but the real world usability significance of this are minimal. Now, if Firefox auto updates in the background like Chrome, I might consider giving it another chance. When I want to go on the net, I don't want to wait for my browser to update.

Absolutely disagree. I have 100 tabs open in general.

Re: Scalability

#145

Post by bzbarsky »

rajpaul wrote: post #138
bzbarsky wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome doesn't update in the background. It downloads the update in the background, then applies it at startup the next time it starts. It just doesn't tell you it's doing that, so you get a slow startup with no explanation of why. The "tell you" part is the only difference between the workflow for current Firefox updates and Chrome updates, in fact... And yes, Firefox might start doing them silently precisely becaus…

>Chrome doesn't update in the background. How do you know that? I assumed Chrome did update in the background because it uses Google's Omaha project, which supports updating when the system is idle. "attempt to update application when the user's machine is idle" http://omaha.googlecode.com/svn/wiki/OmahaOverview.html#Sche...

Oh, it may be able to update "in the background" if the browser is not running. I assumed you meant updating while the browser is running so the update is ready to go the next time you start the browser.

For my use cases, the two situations are actually equivalent, since my browser starts at boot and only shuts down with the OS or when I decide I should really install the security update.

Re: Scalability

#146

Post by starwed »

ori_b wrote: post #127
starwed wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This test isn't about having lots of tabs open, but having lots of tabs opening , all loading at the same time.

Ok. So, apparently, it's testing a usecase that doesn't happen in normal use. So why should I care?

You don't have to? This was a blog post written by a guy whose job is to care about Firefox's memory usage. Most of his work goes into improving every day memory usage, but he thought it would be interesting to see what happens in an extreme case. Chrome is the main competitor, so he ran the same tests against it, so there was something to compare to.

No doubt some portion of people upvoting this article are invested in a Firefox v. Chrome narrative, but that really wasn't the point of the original article.

Re: Scalability

#147

Post by mun2mun »

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…

Well I don't treat them as individual tab, I treat them as a set of groups. Thanks to tree style tabs my tabs are organized as groups manner.

On average I have 5 groups hacker news, reddit, slashdot, google reader, google searching and documentation group. When I work I frequently move around google searching and documentation group. In my leisure time I go to other group.

For example during working I need to search about some feature of a library. I open the top tab of the google searching group middle click on the link I am interested which opens in the new tab in the group. If some time later I need to see the page again just go to the google searching group and get the tab. This way I can easily organize my tabs.

Re: Scalability

#148

Post by zargon »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #139
zargon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently have 203 tabs open, and firefox has been running for 13 days. It's using 2.1gb of memory. I churn through tabs a lot. Firefox used to have memory problems, but it hasn't been a problem for me in at least a year. 10mb per tab is pretty good, IMO.

Interesting, because I have 5 tabs open (running the latest version of FF), and it's using over half a gig of RAM. It's been running since monday. Perhaps I need to take another look at my addons, but I only have four (firebug, web developer, ad block, and diigo), so I really doubt they are the cause.

I think that the browser footprint is fairly large, but as you open more tabs it uses proportionately less ram per tab (though it must level off at some point). I'm using 15 extensions (the only one of yours I'm not using is diigo), I doubt they make much difference.

For some time during the 2.x and 3.x series, firefox would leak memory from closed tabs -- the memory usage would keep going up and up with tab churn, and I'd have to restart the browser to get the memory footprint back down. I don't see that with v4 or v5, and I usually restart the workstation before I need to restart firefox.

Re: Scalability

#149

Post by d0m »

Perceval wrote: post #142
d0m wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of 200 pages of images, get on a real site and open only one tab with a video ;-)

There are plenty of image threads that are not porn. Especially if you forego /b/ for the work-safe topical boards.

(Just wanted to point out that this clearly was a joke) I hope you weren't offended by it :)

Re: Scalability

#150

Post by tjoff »

Humm. My experience are completely opposite. In my experience firefox breaks down quite fast and chrome has always been many orders of magnitude better than any browser I've tested (firefox, (safari), opera, IE).

I have about 500 tabs in chrome now, never been close to that with any other browser, granted the computer is barely usable now as chrome takes pretty much all resources so I'm working on closing some down :) But 2-300 is no problem at all and chrome is the only browser that's capable of that (without serious performance issues) on my machine (64bit Win7 8 GB ram).

And the comments to the article resonates well with my experiences: "Another test, maybe closer to reality: open many tabs, close half of them, open many new tabs, close half of them, etc… And see how your memory gets lost, until you finally have to kill the Firefox process to get it back, so you can open other applications."

And many others that mention that firefox can't handle being left on for days without breaking. I have hundreds of tabs in chrome for weeks at a time, sometimes probably longer but every now and then I feel like letting it update... (although it is a pain to start it with hundreds of tabs and I often get blocked from HN after I start chrome (guess I trigger some dos-filter ;P).

Also, any browser that doesn't run flash in a separate process (that you can kill yourself) isn't usable at all (that is, if you have flash installed (flashblock only delays the inevitable)). Even with few tabs that is a total deal breaker (and really has been since the day chrome launched).

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