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Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

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Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#221

Post by [deleted] »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #217
sp332 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hogging lots of RAM makes my program legitimately run better, then that's what it should do! Chrome runs a process per domain (or something like that) for security and stability reasons. That adds a lot of overhead for lots of tabs. But that's OK because there's actually a reason for using all that RAM.

>If hogging lots of RAM makes my program legitimately run better It objectively doesn't make your program run better to waste RAM. If RAM usage goes up 2x every two years but RAM and hard drive speed go up 20% in the same time period, then using more RAM when you don't need it is making programs more sluggish to start and to suspend to disk, and it's making computers draw more power while sleeping (to keep that much…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#223

Post by tomkarlo »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #192
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…

First world perspective. Any globally-oriented FOSS app like Chromium or Firefox should work to reduce hardware requirements as much as possible to provide best possible performance on devices like Raspberry Pie and MIT's $100 laptop [1]. And even in the first world there are a lot of miserly corporations that penny pinch on things like RAM. If software that wants to target either of those markets can be made more ha…

It's hard to both target the leading edge of the market and also serve minimal-spec hardware targets. Seems like it would make more sense to have a different branch for those targets, being done by someone with a strong business interest in making it work.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#224

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

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…

The problem isn't when everyone is using the same .so/.dll. THAT would be a dream by comparison.

The problem is that one app wants the Mono/.NET runtime, another wants Python, another is using Java, another is using a huge pile of Visual Basic libraries...and then every app ECOSYSTEM has its own pile of dependencies and libraries. And on Windows, to avoid DLL-hell, everyone pretty much ships their own version of libraries to ensure compatibility (and if you're on Mac, the story is pretty much the same there -- apps don't share anything but OS services -- it's only on Linux where you can rebuild everything that people dare share versions, and even then another commenter just pointed out there are bugs with that too).

Java/Eclipse is probably my current worst offender, and Firefox is still greedy (though it's gotten better -- and Chrome is just completely broken on my system right now for whatever reason). Both are actually worse than the (bloated) Visual Studio that I need to run to develop Windows apps. And then of course there's Firefox (which has gotten better) and other various apps I'm running just to do basic development.

Eclipse makes Visual Studio look lean by comparison -- but if I want to develop for Android, I have to work a lot harder to get an alternate environment ALMOST working as well as they've got Eclipse configured to work.

Sounds like you're on Linux or Mac, and not doing as much GUI development as I choose to do. Looking right now Eclipse (the GUI from hell) alone is using 608Mb of memory. I know it has a lot of useful features, but 608Mb is a crazy amount of memory to use for a fancy text editor.

I'm also using Notepad++ with tons of plug-ins, and it takes up And SKYPE is taking 90Mb to sit idle. I use Skype to chat with business clients, so I can't easily just toss it, despite that Pidgin is using 21Mb to connect to 4 different chat networks simultaneously and Skype only connects to one...

The list goes on. And I need to upgrade to 16Gb soon (though looking at the memory usage right now, shortly after a reboot, I'm "only" at 4.1Gb, so it's not critical yet). Sigh.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#225

Post by tomkarlo »

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.

Even if you don't have replaceable RAM, you're still replacing your computer at some regular interval. It just means you have to buy the computer with more RAM than you would if it wasn't upgradeable (which was true anyway.) That's part of the cost of buying a computer where you can't upgrade the RAM.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#226

Post by secoif »

If this appeals to you, I have 2 words: Tab Wrangler.

As a compulsive tab hoarder, I've been using Tab Wrangler for this same purpose for over a year and I believe its approach is far superior: it just closes tabs that you ahven't visited for a period of time. If you haven't been to a tab in ~20 minutes, likely you don't need it on hand. I can't know when I'm done with a tab until I've moved onto my next task, which means I'm no longer thinking about that tab.

Also, you can lock tabs, have a minimum number of tabs (I set mine to 5) and easily list any auto-closed tabs so you don't lose anything, though I find myself only needing to look through that list once or twice a week.

Anyway, Tab Wrangler absolutely changed my life.

Not my project, just think it's awesome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjh...

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#228

Post by idupree »

tomkarlo wrote: post #172
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…

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…

I'd love to be able to upgrade my laptop RAM like that. Laptop CPU and motherboard manufacturers are still quite stingy about the maximum RAM they support. This limit is the only reason I had to buy a new laptop last year, and why I will likely need to buy another one in a few more years. A laptop sold today should support up to 2x64GB DDR3 RAM[1], but typical Ivy Bridge laptops only go up to 2x16GB, and a year ago it was max 2x4GB or for higher-end 2x8GB. The laptop I replaced had max total 3.2GB (you could put in 2x2GB DDR2 but the system would only see about 3.2GB, so I stuck to 2GB+1GB). Its 2007 Core 2 Duo is still blazingly fast, and its disk was easy to upgrade to an SSD.

[1] One can't easily buy a 64GB DIMM today, but Moore's Law is swift and mighty.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#229

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#230

Post by Joeri »

tomkarlo wrote: post #172
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…

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…

Total page size as measured by the http archive project is currently growing 20% per year on average. Any benefit to be had by chrome's speed-ups is lost many times over by web designers bloating their pages. The web is becoming slower to use.

http://httparchive.org/trends.php?s=All&minlabel=Mar+15+...

And yes, that's pure raw bloat. Sites haven't gotten richer content the past 2 years, they've just put on some weight.

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