Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#151

Post by hnriot » Mon, Mar 11, 2013, 4:39 PM UTC

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.

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

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#152

Post by bigwilley » Mon, Mar 11, 2013, 4:39 PM UTC

jbarrow wrote: post #96

I really like the functionality of OneTab, as I'm someone who frequently has 3 concurrent Chrome windows, each with dozens of running tabs. The one thing that's going to prevent me from using this regularly, though, is that once you reopen a tab, there's no back state. I find that some of the most valuable information that I can get from a webpage isn't necessarily the page itself, it's the process leading up to the…

I recently found TabMemFree https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabmemfree/pdanboc...

It is similar to OneTab but keeps the tab open (with Flavicon and Name) but just "parks" it after a time period. It saves back states.

As a heavy open tab users (we have a support group I've heard) I like it. Working with 4 GB of Ram is made much easier!

If you have a tab that you don't want "parked" after 15 minutes (configurable) then you just pin it. So Gmail and Pandora get pinned. The rest park themselves and reload on when I select them.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#153

Post by rapind » Mon, Mar 11, 2013, 4:40 PM UTC

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…

You work for Adobe right?

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#154

Post by buremba » Mon, Mar 11, 2013, 4:41 PM UTC

what about the current session? think browsers as an os, not just a program. you spend most of your time in front of it. they deserve more resource than the other installed programs in your computer.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#155

Post by hnriot » Mon, Mar 11, 2013, 4:41 PM UTC

kintamanimatt wrote: post #113

theorique wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not really, especially if you're doing a lot of research, or for whatever reason the page is particularly complex and it causes the process that tab is running under to consume a lot of memory.

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.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#156

Post by verytrivial » Mon, Mar 11, 2013, 4:43 PM UTC

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…

> RAM is now fantastically cheap.

Sure, but IMO it is the height of hubris to assume that your application's space-time-trade off to gain a few ms here or there is vastly more important that every OTHER application I am trying to run.

Play nice.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#157

Post by notdan » Mon, Mar 11, 2013, 4:47 PM UTC

I like the idea, but how is this any different than the "Bookmark all tabs" feature?

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#158

Post by robotresearcher » Mon, Mar 11, 2013, 4:49 PM UTC

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…

| a pile of 800kb of DLLs/SOs attached

Shared Objects are not too bad, since they are shared between all processes that use (the same version of) them. In fact, the apparently worst case of linking them "into every app" is only slightly worse than having them appear in one app each. Assuming they are not all in the working set of every app at once, the overhead is small. Great OS technology!

I think the main technical problem with code/feature bloat is the increased likelihood of bugs with every additional line of code.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#159

Post by kintamanimatt » Mon, Mar 11, 2013, 4:52 PM UTC

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…

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 going to evaluate, it's faster and easier to click on 50 links in one go than to click, evaluate, close, find my old position, click, evaluate ...! I'm someone that likes to batch tasks because I find it more efficient.

Opening that many tabs isn't something I do every day. I've only got seven open right now, which is normal-ish, but sometimes I need it and I know I'll need it again soon.

(On a side note, I can't really figure out why but I hate the term smell but it triggers a visceral reaction and wish it'd die a horrible death!)

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#160

Post by roc » Mon, Mar 11, 2013, 4:53 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #146

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…

This. 1. I bookmark lots of sites but rarely go back to them (mainly because it's hard to find what I'm looking for) 2. Sometimes I spend ages looking through my history to find something I remember seeing but didn't bookmark 3. I leave dozens of tabs open because I think I'm going to refer back to them but 50% of the time never do. The order and which window they were grouped with is info I need for context. So I wa…

Tracking history would bound right into the 'creepy' range of data collection IMO. But if you were fine with that, it's not hard to imagine such a solution tracking how much time you spent on a given page and using that to make an educated guess that you 'meant' to bookmark it. Or at least weight search results accordingly.

Though the logistics of cloud-storing every single page every user visits would quickly become non-trivial.

And your want #2 seems like a simple UI task. IE already has/had a "bookmark all open tabs"-style menu option -- and I thought the others did too, but I'm not seeing it at the moment.