Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

one-tab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 298 posts

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#191

Post by resurrection »

halviti wrote: post #143
theorique wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just because I had about a hundred tabs open That is a lot of tabs, though.

I average over a hundred tabs regularly. Although once the favicons disappear, I usually open a new window, or group windows by subject matter. I've tried to alter my browsing habits over the years to ease the load on my computer, but I've just come to accept that I am just one of those people. This tool is either the best thing that's ever happened, or it's about to exacerbate my problem 10 fold.

You should try the tree tab plugin. Works like a charm.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#192

Post by SkyMarshal »

jdietrich wrote: post #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 D…

First world perspective. Any globally-oriented FOSS app like Chromium or Firefox should work to reduce hardware requirements as much as possible to provide best possible performance on devices like Raspberry Pie and MIT's $100 laptop [1].

And even in the first world there are a lot of miserly corporations that penny pinch on things like RAM.

If software that wants to target either of those markets can be made more hardware efficient, it should be.

[1] http://one.laptop.org/

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#193

Post by chongli »

k3n wrote: post #150
kintamanimatt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely disagree. We've seen too much complacency in recent years when it comes to memory usage. Developers think it's ok for their applications to bloat out and have a huge memory footprint. I'd rather applications were developed in such a way that they were more memory efficient. I've had a recent incident in which Chrome was consuming about 7GB of memory, just because I had about a hundred tabs open! It was rea…

There's no way you could effectively work with 100 tabs open, and that is surely a smell for inefficiency. For any given task, 5 tabs is probably reaching the upper limit on what's actually _required_, with around 10 being the upper limit. Granted, you could have multiple tasks ongoing in parallel, but are you really working in parallel at that point? If not, save the tabs and return to them later. I really doubt you…

Tabs have replaced bookmarks as the means of saving stuff for later. Why is that? Because bookmarks require a lot more mental effort to organize and take more effort to delete when you're done with them. Bookmarks also take a lot longer to load than a tab (which is usually loaded already).

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#195

Post by bsimpson »

k3n wrote: post #150
kintamanimatt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely disagree. We've seen too much complacency in recent years when it comes to memory usage. Developers think it's ok for their applications to bloat out and have a huge memory footprint. I'd rather applications were developed in such a way that they were more memory efficient. I've had a recent incident in which Chrome was consuming about 7GB of memory, just because I had about a hundred tabs open! It was rea…

There's no way you could effectively work with 100 tabs open, and that is surely a smell for inefficiency. For any given task, 5 tabs is probably reaching the upper limit on what's actually _required_, with around 10 being the upper limit. Granted, you could have multiple tasks ongoing in parallel, but are you really working in parallel at that point? If not, save the tabs and return to them later. I really doubt you…

If the majority of people are using a tool in a particular way, it becomes the tool's responsibility to meet that need effectively. Just because you didn't anticipate the ways that real people would use your technology doesn't mean you get assuage responsibility for its shortcomings because you didn't foresee them.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#196

Post by T-hawk »

roc wrote: post #132
roc wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So do bookmarks. And this overlap becomes obvious as people inevitably ask for Chrome or OneTab to allow them to cluster tabs by topic/project -- because a linear scan is never going to 'work' for people who leave enough tabs open that it becomes a 'problem'. The underlying problem here is workflow. People are leaving tabs open as a reminder of things to which they intend to return. (Regardless of whether they will o…

Thinking on this more, the cloud-stored cache would wind up eventually being a subset of google's whole-internet-database. From which you could run a pretty awesome search service. Because it wouldn't consist of randomly spidered or submitted noise. It would only be things explicitly identified as useful or interesting . And you could rank by how many people bookmarked it, when the bookmarks happened, who they are, e…

Until the SEO optimizers and bot nets themselves start bookmarking their own spammy noise in this cache too. Then we're back to the usual arms race of trying to identify quality content and providers pointing to other quality content and providers while all the junk vendors are trying to masquerade as quality.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#197

Post by danneu »

ronalddriver wrote: post #110
jdietrich wrote: post #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 D…

i agree. this is the logic of someone willing to adapt to the environment around him. While the best solution would be more efficient programming, consumers are best served to max out their RAM and work with what they're given.

    > this is the logic of someone willing to adapt to the environment around him.
How is this true? OP is saying devs should dump their app into memory and that devs need to adapt to OP's limitless RAM.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#198

Post by hnriot »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #162
hnriot wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tabs are not a replacement for bookmarks, the idea is not to open an ever increasing number of tabs, but rather bookmark and folder things if you need 100 concurrent research tabs. It's just the wrong way to use the browser. It would be like me arguing that driving my car with the parking brake on makes it get hot, of course it does, it's user error.

Well, no. If you've got all those tabs open and you're flitting between their contents, it's appropriate. It's not the wrong way to use the tool, it's a way to use it that's perfectly appropriate in some cases. There's no reason I should be fighting against my browser because my optimal workflow causes it to chew through memory!

no. when number of open tabs < 10-20, yes sure, but when that number reaches 100, your doing it all wrong. Its not about how much memory it consumes, that's irrelevant, if you need more memory just go to crucial.com, it's dirt cheap. Its about using the tools properly.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#199

Post by hnriot »

simonster wrote: post #176
hnriot wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you have a 100 tabs open, you're using it wrong.

Well, if you have 100 tabs open, you might be using the wrong browser. Chrome is obviously not designed to work with that many tabs, either from a UI standpoint or, apparently, a memory use standpoint. However, I don't really see why there needs to be a strict limit on the number of tabs you can have open before your browser starts trashing all your memory. This is a problem that can be solved by designing your softw…

there isn't a strict limit, its just not a viable use case for current browsers.

Maybe what we need is Chrome/FF to consider the very high tab count as a use case and handle it better, when you have so many tabs it's not easy to find the 1 in 100 that you're looking for, we would need a new find tool, possible the browser should build a client side tf/idf index and make the whole working set (workspace) searchable. You see what I mean? Until the browser changes to support this usecase, the usage will be klunky and fraught with problems.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#200

Post by bsimpson »

Fargren wrote: post #99
jdietrich wrote: post #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 D…

Memory is cheap in the the first world. I live in Argentina, which is not a particularly poor or undeveloped country, and my 8GB of RAM are almost impressive. I know of no one who has 16 GB, and a few of my friends have 8. Most people I know of have between 1GB and 4GB, with 2GB being by far the most common configuration.

Most people in the States have whatever their computer came with. Even computers with user-serviceable RAM can usually only address twice as much RAM as the machine came with. So, if last generation's hardware comes with nMB RAM, and this generation's comes with 2nMB RAM, owners of last generation's hardware can usually only upgrade their RAM once.

It's a bit silly, because RAM and storage seem to be the only things most people need more of on a daily basis. I suspect 5 year old CPUs would meet most people's needs just fine.

Post reply on HN