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Browsers eating RAM

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Re: Browsers eating RAM

#51

Post by deanclatworthy »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #36

I use Safari because it's best by a mile on macOS for power consumption, but if you ever use a memory hungry site like Facebook for more than a few minutes it throws up a memory usage warning and everything becomes extremely slow and you get astronomical scroll jank. I'm guessing that's because it throws a hard cap on tab memory usage and if you go over that it thrashes wildly. So it respects your system, but in doin…

Yep this is really weird and annoying. I get it even streaming video in full screen.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#52

Post by Jyaif »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #48
Jyaif wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the security tradeoff. If you put everything in a single process you save a ton of RAM at the expense of security.

Safari appears to use a separate process for each tab.

Oh, there's much more processes than just tab. You also have a separate process for the network stack, the JS engine, the password manager, audio, etc... You can also have one process per extension.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#53

Post by fermigier »

Who are these people? No contact information whatsoever on their website. Twitter account inactive since last October. Undated blog posts (this particular one may be several months old).

I'd love to use their product but this doesn't incite confidence.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#54

Post by deanclatworthy »

tpetry wrote: post #19

https://chromeisbad.com/ I did not have time yet to schow whether the claims are true but i found this when searching why i have insanely high windowserver cpu activity. Seems chrome on mac is heading into a strange direction. For normal browsing i use safari since a long time as the battery will last the longest compared to firefox and chrome. But the chrome developer tools are so damn good i can‘t get rid of it for…

WindowServer is more than just chrome. I don't doubt chrome is eating the resources on my machine, but it's not as simple as this site makes out.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#55

Post by readittwice »

Those numbers don't make sense to me, it claims that Safari would use 73M of memory with both Twitter and Gmail. But locally on my machine I see that Activity Monitor already reports 490M of memory usage just for the Gmail process of Safari alone. The Twitter login page also already needs 90M. Can someone check as well?

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#56

Post by llimllib »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #50

The whole browser situation at the moment is so incredibly frustrating. I will NOT browse the internet without a fully-fledged adblocker - no pihole is not enough. This means pretty much only using Firefox - but I have about 10 tabs open at the moment, each using over 500mb of ram while idle. What on earth they are doing I don't know... and I find it very sluggish when playing video. Chrome is my daily browser, even…

I prefer ubo, but have found adguard very tolerable for browsing with Safari

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#57

Post by markdog12 »

readittwice wrote: post #55

Those numbers don't make sense to me, it claims that Safari would use 73M of memory with both Twitter and Gmail. But locally on my machine I see that Activity Monitor already reports 490M of memory usage just for the Gmail process of Safari alone. The Twitter login page also already needs 90M. Can someone check as well?

Yep, was thinking of the same thing when I read it. I have 2 gmail tabs in Safari, each taking over 1GB. One twitter that's about 1GB, one Slack that's over 1GB. Some of this is shared memory.

Is it that they don't realize Safari is a multi-process architecture, and they're only measuring Safari's main process?

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#58

Post by snet0 »

roblabla wrote: post #27
The_rationalist wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? If it's allocated to chrome it cannot be reused by other software. Even if it's allocated but unused

You absolutely can allocate memory without using up any backing resources. On Linux (which is where I have experience, but I assume macos works similarly), even after mapping some memory, it won't be backed by any physical memory (e.g. RAM) until you actually write there. And you can mmap files into your address space, meaning you can place a huge file you can access through memory, but it's not actually taking any R…

So can you allocate more memory than what is available in this way?

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#59

Post by eklitzke »

londons_explore wrote: post #44

Chromes multiprocess model and arena memory allocators have a massive impact on memory use... But they are also a big security win. Any browser with a small memory footprint you should ask yourself "if someone manages to find a buffer overflow in this thing, will my bank password be sitting adjacent in memory because the memory allocator is trying to save RAM rather than being security conscious"?

What is the security win you get from arena allocators?

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#60

Post by rank0 »

The_rationalist wrote: post #17
QazCetelic wrote: post #8

Could it be similar to the "Linux ate my RAM" situation and that the RAM is used but still available?

What do you mean? If it's allocated to chrome it cannot be reused by other software. Even if it's allocated but unused

In fact, this is the entire premise of virtual memory! More memory is/can be allocated than physical memory exists. Each process has its own isolated address space with (from the process perspective) "unlimited" size.
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