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Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

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Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#171

Post by bd_at_rivenhill »

robotresearcher wrote: post #158
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…

| 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 technica…

Actually, I encounter the problem of mismatched .so versions constantly when running new programs or libraries that are built from source. It would be nice if developers would figure out how to use libtool (and whatever the Windows equivalent is) so that this doesn't become a regular exercise in frustration.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#172

Post by tomkarlo »

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…

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 our usage and the size of the pages we're loading is also rising rapidly. If you loaded Chrome from two years ago and used it how you work today, you might not find the memory footprint that much better than the current version.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#173

Post by jonknee »

FigBug wrote: post #83
reggplant wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And RAM uses power, whether it's being used or not. Having more RAM means shorter battery life.

I suspect the power penalty of RAM is made up for by the fact that you don't have to hit the hard disk to get that data back (firing up the HDD will suck a lot of juice). It also appears the needs are pretty much tied to the chip, so a 4GB and 8GB module use about the same amount of power.

http://superuser.com/questions/40113/does-installing-larger-...

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#174

Post by danneu »

grok2 wrote: post #124
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…

Software should be optimized for the most common use-case -- not the outliers. Most people usually buy computers in standard configurations (which typically means 4GB to 8GB of memory) or use company provided equipment and they aren't going to be happy with being told "just buy another 8GB of memory -- it's only $120" as a solution to the slowness of their browsing!

And not everyone is browsing the internet from their disposable income suburbia with their extensible upgradable tower computer.

But then again the HN bubble also thinks my mother knows "Twitter Bootstrap" by name.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#175

Post by bd_at_rivenhill »

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.

How do you suggest to handle the fact that there are many websites which break the "back" button these days? I've gotten to the point where I open a new tab practically every time I follow a link. Not to mention news sites where you need to open all of the interesting articles that you see before the page updates and they go away.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#176

Post by simonster »

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.

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 software to deal with that use scenario, either by pausing unused pages and serializing the resources to disk or by disposing of the unused pages entirely without removing the tabs. You'd want a pref for this, but it seems entirely reasonable to me.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#177

Post by adaml_623 »

srgseg wrote: post #10

OneTab developer here: thanks for all your suggestions, I'll be working on them :) A few FAQs: 1. The OneTab tab persists even if you close your web browser. 2. If you ever close your OneTab tab, this doesn't lose your tabs. You can always get it back by clicking the blue extension icon. 3. Your tabs are never sent to our servers unless you press the button to 'share as a web page'.

Does it only store the GET information or will it store a POST search request as well?

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#178

Post by tomkarlo »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #159
k3n wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goin…

You don't open 100 apps on your computer and then complain about memory usage. Running 100 tabs at the same time, all of which may be running live JS processes, is about the same. It's a perfectly valid usage pattern but it's also going to eat a lot of memory. It's not like driving with your parking brake on, but it's like loading your car up with its maximum passenger capacity and then complaining that it's accelerating more slowly.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#179

Post by rmk2 »

colomon wrote: post #142
rmk2 wrote: post #69

I absolutely fail to see the point here. Why should I use this? Is this again one of these instances where, magically, free RAM is good? 30 tabs opened simultaneously (with AdBlock, Ghostery and Disconnect), alongside Thunderbird, Emacs (+daemon) and a full DE run up to 1.8GiB of RAM used on my machine, which is everything but fast, new, or fancy. Consequently, I still have 2GB of RAM remaining that are not directly…

Well, yay for you. As I posted in the Firefox thread, when I checked this morning I had 16 tabs open using 2.6GiB of memory, and that without the using websites like Facebook and Twitter that I've found to be memory pigs in the past. I use AdBlock, maybe Ghostery and Disconnect are magic? In general, my machine has 8GiB of RAM and low-memory thrashing / out-of-memory errors are pretty much a daily occurrence. They're…

My post was in no way meant to be boasting, quite the contrary, it assumes that my computer is on the lower end of what will be widely used, especially here on HN.

> In general, my machine has 8GiB of RAM and low-memory thrashing / out-of-memory errors are pretty much a daily occurrence. They're certainly not all Chrome's fault, but I don't think it is helping matters any.

I suppose the choice of operating systems has to do with this as well, since a browser can only do so much if the underlying OS handles memory allocation in a less than ideal way. This at least sounds like it might a problem that is situated on a much lower level than your browser dealing with multiple tabs.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#180

Post by scholia »

roc wrote: post #102
srgseg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but this extension will help you distinguish between the tabs you want to close forever and the tabs you want to return to later.

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…

In passing, one reason bookmarking is broken is that "infinite pages" usually don't return you to where you were, as they should, but to the top of the page.

"Infinite pages" are also breaking search. Google finds a hit but you die of boredom before you can actually scroll down that far....

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