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Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

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Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#251

Post by runeks »

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…

This is true, but it isn't relevant for embedded devices (my ARM Chromebook has only 2 GB RAM), and DDR2 RAM isn't as cheap as DDR3 RAM (my motherboard is from 2007/2008).

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#252

Post by marcamillion »

As someone that lives with 40 tabs open in any 1 window at a time, with at least 2 windows open....THANK YOU.

I love this. I don't get why people are being so negative on this thread. Also that discussion about the cost of RAM, is pointless. Who cares how much RAM/Diskspace costs. That doesn't mean we should be inefficient with our resources, because we can simply buy more for cheap. That's an excuse that lazy developers use.

That being said, I would love to know a few things about this extension (if the creators are here):

- Where is this list stored? On my HDD? In my Gmail Account?

- I would love to backup the list, so it doesn't get lost. I am accustomed to using Chrome's history, but that gets wonky from time to time and I have been in many situations where I expect the full history to be there, but it isn't for one reason or another.

- Will my One Tab list be there if I reset my machine? I assume so, but what if I close my `One Tab` tab?

Other than that...THANK YOU...for this WONDERFUL extension. This will easily be my most used extension - hands down.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#253

Post by Flenser »

marcamillion wrote: post #252

As someone that lives with 40 tabs open in any 1 window at a time, with at least 2 windows open....THANK YOU. I love this. I don't get why people are being so negative on this thread. Also that discussion about the cost of RAM, is pointless. Who cares how much RAM/Diskspace costs. That doesn't mean we should be inefficient with our resources, because we can simply buy more for cheap. That's an excuse that lazy develo…

It's stored on your PC in the window.localstorage for that extension. I used the Extension Gallery and Web Store Inspector to look at the code without installing the extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/extension-gallery-...

It might be easier just to save them as bookmarks. Right click on any tab in the tab bar and choose "Bookmark all tabs" or press CTRL+SHIFT+D. Use the Split Tabs extension to break them up into local groups first:

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

I've talked more about the benefits of using just bookmarks here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5358109

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#254

Post by Dylan16807 »

simonster wrote: post #237
hnriot wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually I usually set firefox to squeeze tabs. I love it. As long as the favicon is visible it works fine. Hiding the favicon in small tabs is the real sin of chrome.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#255

Post by jdietrich »

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…

Python and Ruby are on average about 40x slower than C. Fifteen years ago, this relegated them to the status of "scripting languages" that were unsuitable for Real Work. Today, there are still plenty of important applications where every clock cycle matters, but many more where that performance difference is absolutely irrelevant.

We have come to understand that developer time is vastly more valuable than computing resources in the overwhelming majority of applications - the only real disagreement is how many orders of magnitude of inefficiency we consider tolerable. Even the most resource-constrained applications are using higher-level languages and computationally inefficient designs, because it's much easier to spec a faster chip than a smarter dev team.

Most applications aren't getting significantly slower. Web browsers are a perfect example of this; Almost every aspect of their performance has improved vastly over the past few years, but as a result we're building much more sophisticated web apps and doing things in the browser that were once purely the domain of highly optimised native apps. It's a near-perfect example of Jevons Paradox. Improving the efficiency of a process reduces the cost of the output, which leads to increased demand for the inputs to that process.

My current computer has 700,000x more RAM than my first computer. If 99% of that memory is wasted, I'm still doing pretty well.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#256

Post by tripzilch »

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…

I agree it sounds a bit excessive (though I go up to 50 tabs myself often enough), but how is you telling him off about how his way of tab-usage is inefficient in itself in any way relevant to a discussion about browsers memory usage??

I hope you didn't really try to say "there's nothing wrong with browsers' memory usage, as long as you don't stress them too much" ? :) :)

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#257

Post by tripzilch »

k3n wrote: post #210
kintamanimatt wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can I say? It worked for me. I was doing a lot of research and things I'd read would lead to more searches of tangential topics that I'd want to revisit in the coming hours. This method of working fit my mental model and I was flitting between tabs as necessary, not just opening them up with the hope that I'd read them sometime . Also, if I need to click on a whole bunch of links that I know I'm immediately goin…

Originally you explained the problem as if you always had 100+ tabs open, but now it sounds like an occasional occurrence. I was mainly speaking to if you always had 100+ open -- as if that was your normal workflow. I do understand at times you want to open many more than that for a limited time, but those situations (at least in my experience) are typically very short-lived and don't represent my ordinary common usa…

> Originally you explained the problem as if you always had 100+ tabs open, but now it sounds like an occasional occurrence. I was mainly speaking to if you always had 100+ open -- as if that was your normal workflow.

... because if you do it only occasionally it uses less memory? :-/

> [and yes, smell is supposed to invoke that reaction! a code "smell", or process "smell", etc. is something that stinks, and it should disgust you, and you should work to clean up the 'smell' ASAP! :)]

Yes, Mother.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#258

Post by tripzilch »

sciurus wrote: post #249
halviti wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is using this tool significantly different than bookmarking then closing all your currently open tabs, which you can easily do now?

Good point, we'll have to see. I have the same problem as the GP (though up to 50 tabs usually) and indeed "bookmark all"+"close all" doesn't really help because if you never review those bookmarks, you tend not to take the step either.

As someone else itt already said, a better solution would be some improved bookmarking system that I can use to just file away a tab, knowing that it'll be there when I need it, as well as offering the option of, I dunno popping up for review in a couple of days or a specific time maybe.

One thing I do not understand is why modern browsers, apart from bookmark-folders do not offer tags as well. They were a hugely successful way of ordering things back in the day and they have all but disappeared for some reason. And they would be tremendously useful in bookmarks (to me). And del.icio.us is dead, plus I don't want a web service to keep my bookmarks, it's too slow.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#259

Post by derleth »

columbo wrote: post #186
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…

It's not about the money, it's about the complete disregard of quality. The applications we create should only use the resources they need.

> the complete disregard of quality

Quality is measured on multiple axes. RAM use is only one of them. CPU use is another, for example, and it's often the case that reducing CPU use requires increasing RAM use.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#260

Post by derleth »

hnriot wrote: post #151
halviti wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Or, as Apple says, "You're holding it wrong."
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