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Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

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Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#231

Post by jjore »

learc83 wrote: post #185
tomkarlo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8GB of RAM is about $50 right now. If you have to replace that every $2 years, are you really complaining about the cost of $25 per year on your $1,000 computer system? It's a rounding error. Chrome, in particular, is generally be used for far more tabs (I have like 30 open right now on a MacBook Air) and increasingly complex web sites every year. It's easy to look at memory usage and complain, but the fact is that o…

>If you have to replace that every $2 years, are you really complaining about the cost of $25 per year on your $1,000 computer system? That's assuming you're using a computer with user upgradeable RAM, and not a new macbook pro.

If it's not upgradeable then it's disposable. Get the new one next time.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#232

Post by ibrahima »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #141
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 have 8gb. There was a time when 1gb was more than enough. Now you're saying I should have 16gb -- and you're right! This is Not A Good Thing. This is people throwing every last feature -- even if it has a pile of 800kb of DLLs/SOs attached -- into every app, with no regard for memory. I find my system thrashing almost daily at this point. I need to upgrade. Two years ago, running predominantly the same software, 4G…

This specific case is not bloat at all though, it's actually you as a user having too much content that you care about. So I don't see why this is relevant at all.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#233

Post by ibrahima »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #93
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…

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…

I don't see how it's a developers' fault that you opened 100 tabs in Chrome. 70MB per tab is really not that much, I don't think browser memory usage has actually gone up by much compared to other applications. I think the fact that it was usable up to that point is a testament to its design, though I personally think Firefox handles large numbers of tabs better overall (UI wise).

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#234

Post by ibrahima »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #148
adventured wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, a hundred tabs is still far beyond a lot. If a hundred tabs is not really a lot, what would be? 250? 1,000?

Whatever the brightline test for "a lot" is, there's no compelling reason each tab should be consuming about 70MB. Under Chrome, each tab runs in its own process, which is certainly a contributing factor. I appreciate this is for stability and security, but it's not the best solution for the problem and has some serious drawbacks, i.e. horrible memory usage.

As I said in another reply to one of your comments, I don't think 70MB is a lot per tab. I'm fairly certain that if you run Firefox 2 for instance it'll use close to that amount for one tab.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#237

Post by simonster »

hnriot wrote: post #199
simonster wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Y…

The Firefox tab bar is naturally more usable than the Chrome tab bar with large numbers of tabs because it scrolls rather than trying to fit them all in the bar. (I sometimes wonder whether squeezing tabs to the point of absurdity was actually a conscious decision by the Chrome developers to limit the number of tabs people can open and thus memory use.) There are a lot of Firefox extensions that add additional tools to manage large numbers of tabs, of which Tree Style Tabs is perhaps the most popular. There are not as many Chrome extensions, since Chrome's UI is not as extensible.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#238

Post by Dylan16807 »

ibrahima wrote: post #232
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 8gb. There was a time when 1gb was more than enough. Now you're saying I should have 16gb -- and you're right! This is Not A Good Thing. This is people throwing every last feature -- even if it has a pile of 800kb of DLLs/SOs attached -- into every app, with no regard for memory. I find my system thrashing almost daily at this point. I need to upgrade. Two years ago, running predominantly the same software, 4G…

This specific case is not bloat at all though, it's actually you as a user having too much content that you care about. So I don't see why this is relevant at all.

It's not 'boat' per se but it's not caused by the user content. It's caused by chrome's process model. Firefox uses almost an order of magnitude less memory per tab.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#239

Post by bjustin »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #116
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…

Totally agree. My PC, which needs replacing, only has 2GB of memory, because that's what the motherboard supports.

Sometimes motherboards work fine with more than the advertised supported maximum. It would be worth a shot if you can try with borrowed or return-able RAM.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#240

Post by espadrine »

hnriot wrote: post #199
simonster wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Y…

The design of Firefox makes it able to handle a lot more tabs than Google Chrome. You can easily have two hundred with no sweat.

It also features Panorama built-in, which lets you search through all the tabs. It's as simple as Ctrl+Shift+E, type your keyword.

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