I figured that around 150 was an unlikely use case but see from the comments that some people are using approx 100 tabs. I can't imagine doing that. What kind of real world use cases do people have for such a huge number of tabs? And how do they navigate efficiently?
Scalability
21–30 of 165 posts
Re: Scalability
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox compartment memory as well. Using a separate process it the easy way, using thread is the hard way. Each has pro and cons I guess. Even Firefox is getting a multiprocess model for testing. But for example you can't completely isolate a thread if it crashes. But you can forbid it to access other memory areas for security, that's what Firefox does. Since Firefox 4 each tab has it's own separate garbage collecto…
>But you can forbid it to access other memory areas for security Not in C/++ in any standard definition of "thread".
Sure you can. Use the mprotect() system call: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/mprotect.ht...
Re: Scalability
#23Windows, Linux or OSX? I'm curious because on Linux, threads and processes are essentially the same thing - they're the same data structure in the kernel. But as far as I know, that is not true on Windows.
I also find his conclusion a bit disingenuous: I never have more than ~10 tabs open. I'm more interested in the performance around my actual usage, not an order of magnitude more.
Re: Scalability
#24Anyone care to share how their usage patterns lead to having hundreds of tabs open at a single time? How is it even feasible to find a specific tab without doing a time consuming linear search?
I rarely have more than 4-5 tabs open at a time, so I'm honestly curious.
Re: Scalability
#25I've had the contrary experience with FF4 and Chrome... Chrome is like lightning
Except - as multiple people already mentioned - this article is about the Firefox Nightly, which currently means Firefox 8. There are huge differences between FF 4 and FF 8 (or 4 and >5, for that matter).
Re: Scalability
#26This is why I use both Chrome and Firefox. I am a big, tab user, and Chrome doesn't even provide decent tab management with large number of tabs, so I have not been able to even test it properly.
So Chrome is my default system browser for quickly opening a link, that I get through chats, email, etc and for quick browsing and google sessions. It starts up fast and is well 'fast'. For serious research/reading/browsing sessions I prefer to use Firefox. Synchronize bookmarks and yay, you have the best of both worlds.
Re: Scalability
#27I know an anecdote isn't data, but here we go: I often have >100 tabs open. I also sometimes have to restart my mac, and reopen those tabs. While Chrome then struggles for a few minutes, it doesn't take half an hour, like this article suggests, to open 100+ tabs. And I did switch to Chrome from Firefox, as it seems to handle a lot of open tabs a lot better.
I'm pretty sure the total time depends on which webpages you open. Also please note that this is for Firefox nightly (8) only. This might also be true for FF 6 and 7 but nothing before that. Memshrink enhancements have only started at FF 6 (which is not yet released as stable, but soon)
I'd also assume that the author was using a new profile with no cache for each test run.
Re: Scalability
#28Anyone care to share how their usage patterns lead to having hundreds of tabs open at a single time? How is it even feasible to find a specific tab without doing a time consuming linear search? I rarely have more than 4-5 tabs open at a time, so I'm honestly curious.
I'm guessing people are mostly just using them as a reading queue. (Middle-click everything, then Ctrl+W to advance.) Of course, tabs aren't actually built for this (mostly; I think Apple has realized that people do this, as the newest Safari seems to unload the render state for tabs that have been in the background of a window for a while; everything reflows when you actually switch to the tab.)
Re: Scalability
#29I figured that around 150 was an unlikely use case but see from the comments that some people are using approx 100 tabs. I can't imagine doing that. What kind of real world use cases do people have for such a huge number of tabs? And how do they navigate efficiently?
I've seen tab enthusiasts. They are incapable of tracking which tab they already have open and reopen the same one over and over again.
Re: Scalability
#30Performance is the side-effect, not the cause. The cause is the fact that chrome uses separate processes both for security, and so if one tab crashes, you don't lose them all. The fact that it uses more memory is a design tradeoff (although with shared text pages it's not as bad as one might think). The real question is whether you would ever have that many tabs open, and how much memory do you have on your desktop?
Even back to the days before Chrome was released, many many people used to complain that Firefox grinded to a halt when they have 250 (!) tabs open.