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Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

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Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#71
post #27
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(OneTab developer here): None of your tabs are sent to a third party server. It's all stored in HTML5 local storage. The only way the one-tab servers know about your tabs is if you click to 'share as a web page', which transmits your tabs to our servers to create a web page you can share with others.

Your website talks about which information is not sent to OneTab. Which information is sent to OneTab?

The OneTab servers are never accessed unless you click the "share as a web page" button. We don't know what tabs you have open, or what tabs you have put in your OneTab list.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#72
Initially I thought this might be an easier way for me to save sessions than my current session saving solution which doesn't make saving a single window a one click operation. I could use in conjunction with the split tabs to new window extension

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-split/imjbfepo...

to get just the tabs I want to save, and then put them in a new list. However I think I'll stick with Session Buddy

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac...

as it allows:

1. naming of saved sessions (of which I have many). It's list of saved sessions will be easier scan to find the one I'm interested in.

2. opening of saved urls without removing them from the saved session. This I would find infuriating due to the way I use saved sessions as a more powerful bookmark feature.

Also, if I closed the OneTab tab there didn't appear to be a way to bring it back without creating a new list.

Some features that I'd like to see in a session saving chrome extension:

1. Sync to my google account with chrome extension syncing. Sessions Buddy will hopefully have this in the next release but it's been in development for over a year...

2. Multiple saved session lists so I can separate sessions between e.g. work/private, or "things I want to get back to" and "archived things that might be useful in future."

3. Integration with omnibar searching.

1 and 3 Could be done by saving sessions as bookmarks, which is what FreshStart does

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/freshstart-cross-b...

but I don't use that extension because of it's confusing UI.

After Edit:

I should have mentioned. The easiest way I've found to limit chrome memory is to firstly only enable the extensions I use on a day to day basis, and enable/disable others as needed using Extension Manager

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/extensions-manager...

and then kill every tab process in the chrome task manager after chrome starts up. I usually have 90-100 tabs and currently have 142 tabs open. My system would grind to a halt if I didn't do this.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#73
post #13

Edit: This is not meant to sound discouraging to the developer; I just suspect he solved the wrong problem. I find it very strange that a tool exists to reduce chrome's memory footprint by closing tabs. This does not seem to be the right solution to any problem I can think of. If memory consumption is what bugs you, maybe you should use a browser that consumes less memory per open tab. If the number of open tabs is w…

You can make the same argument. OneTab is a partial solution whereas using another browser which consumes less memory per open tab isn't a solution at all if you want to use Chrome's features.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#74
Oh hey! I built something similar a while ago, for somewhat similar reasons: "Pause Tabs" (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pause-tabs/gldljdh...).

The use-case is slightly different, though--instead of being an en-masse "dump these things out of my sight" button, I basically wanted a single-page "bookmark" that works more like the real kind you use in books, where the two fundamental operations are:

> "Open, remove the bookmark, and restore reading to previous position, atomically"; and

> "Save position, create bookmark, and put away for later, atomically".

If you want, though, it can still give you the same effect of "hammer the button to 'put away' a window's worth of tabs."

On the other hand, the bookmarks Pause Tabs creates [despite just being regular bookmarks] preserve of your vertical-scroll position on the page, which is kind of nice for long documents. I wonder why that isn't a "built-in thing bookmarks are just expected to do", actually.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#75
post #63
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

where did the 1% go?

Some long-running hidden chromium process that doesn't seem to die when you quit or force-quit chrome on mountain lion. You have to go into activity monitor to kill it. This never happened in Snow Leopard.

Could it be that you have "Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed" setting to be on?

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#76
post #23

I love the simplicity. At the risk of adding complexity, there's this Chrome extension I used to love and use all the time called JoinTabs, that unfortunately started shipping with some nasty malware. It did this very simple thing of collecting all the tabs in all your open windows and putting them in one window. Since OneTab only seems to work on the tabs in a single window, is there any way to combine these useful…

I use "Merge Windows"! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/merge-windows/adja...

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#77
post #16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(OneTab developer here): None of your tabs are sent to a third party server. It's all stored in HTML5 local storage. The only way the one-tab servers know about your tabs is if you click to 'share as a web page', which transmits your tabs to our servers to create a web page you can share with others.

Thanks for the clarification, I should read more carefully. Apologies.

I think this is a great idea, however I think you can make less ambiguous if you don't say "will not share". I think you are better saying...."will not transmit any information to our server". A lot of services don't intend to "share" things that are uploaded to their servers. Much easier decision to download/install if you unequivocally state that nothing will ever be Transmitted to the server. I personally am hesitant to install this just because it has the capability for me to accidentally upload my private info if I click the wrong setting.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#78
I think that this 95% number is wrong. Likely doesn't take good old shared memory into consideration...

http://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/google-chrome-memory-usage-...

"Measuring memory

If you're measuring memory in a multi-process application like Google Chrome, don't forget to take into account shared memory. If you add the size of each process via the Windows XP task manager, you'll be double counting the shared memory for each process. If there are a large number of processes, double-counting can account for 30-40% extra memory size."

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#79
Memory use seems like a really pointless thing for users to care about. There's a widespread intuition that using RAM is inherently bad and low memory usage is a worthwhile goal, but it doesn't really make sense. The key performance goal is minimising latency, which is best served by using as much RAM as possible without having to swap out.

RAM is now fantastically cheap. 16GB of DDR3 costs less than $120 in either DIMM or SODIMM format, so there's little reason not to load out your machine with far more memory than you'd practically need.

I'd like software to use more memory, not less - for the vast majority of the time, most of my RAM is unused and my disk is idle, so why not use an aggressive strategy of pre-emptive caching?

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#80

Memory use seems like a really pointless thing for users to care about. There's a widespread intuition that using RAM is inherently bad and low memory usage is a worthwhile goal, but it doesn't really make sense. The key performance goal is minimising latency, which is best served by using as much RAM as possible without having to swap out. RAM is now fantastically cheap. 16GB of DDR3 costs less than $120 in either D…

Remember not everyone can afford the latest beast of a machine that can accommodate 16GB RAM, some people still have laptops that can hold a maximum of 4GB by design limitation; it's more likely to be those people worrying about Chrome's RAM usage.
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