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The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

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Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#61

Post by anexprogrammer »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #26
anexprogrammer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, good, it's not just me! One anecdote - 5 years ago FF was the clear winner for coping with tab abuse. Stable and coped with hundreds of tabs happily, Chrome started crashing pages beyond 50 or so. Now it's the perfect reverse, FF hates a lot of tabs open and Chrome is stable with apparently limitless numbers.

Personally I have both working fine with hundreds of tabs, but chrome uses 5-10 times the ram.

Hmm. Maybe it's a FF add-on causing the problems for me, though I'm not using anything uncommon. An internal ps like chrome has might help pinning that down.

Chrome is definitely the RAM greedy one (and so many processes!), and always has been.

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#62

Post by keeperofdakeys »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #61
keeperofdakeys wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I have both working fine with hundreds of tabs, but chrome uses 5-10 times the ram.

Hmm. Maybe it's a FF add-on causing the problems for me, though I'm not using anything uncommon. An internal ps like chrome has might help pinning that down. Chrome is definitely the RAM greedy one (and so many processes!), and always has been.

Firefox has "about:memory", which can give you some rather detailed information about memory usage.

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#63

Post by SeanDav »

insulanian wrote: post #31
hga wrote: post #12

What I do, when Chrome, or rather, my abuse of it (14 windows, 735 tabs at the moment, Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit on a 32 GiB system) becomes onerous is to go to the task manager and kill groups of tabs taking up "too much" memory, and very occasionally, too much CPU. (I get away with that abuse, which it a bit higher right now because I'm in the process of buying a house, by killing all tabs after launching, and only enabl…

I'm genuinely interested in the reasons people maintain so many tabs open. What type of workflow you have when you end up with so much stuff open? How do you get back to some of those tabs? Wouldn't it be easier to just google it again when you need it instead of having it lingering around and wasting your HW resources?

I am also a tabaholic, often running 5+ windows, some with many dozens of tabs and some with just a handful. I use them for easy context switching. If I am in programming mode I switch to the relevant window, sometimes a separate window for each language I am programming in at the moment, for games and leisure, a different window, for news and related, yet another, for general internet use, yet another.

I tend to use Firefox, with its default behaviour of only loading tabs that are active (a huge memory saver) and easy use of NoScript. I also use Great Suspender for Chrome to try control its excessive memory use - works well.

BTW. If you have a lot of HN tabs open and you try to reload a session after a restart, you get IP blocked for a short time - another good reason to use Firefox if you like keeping a few HN news tabs open, as it only loads 1 tab and keeps background tabs suspended.

I have tried active session managers but after several problems with corruption of sessions I reverted back to multiple windows and tabs.

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#64

Post by leni536 »

Kristine1975 wrote: post #11
leni536 wrote: post #8

Idea: What if there was an OS interface to mark memory regions as "throwaway"? Throwaway in the sense that it's less costly to recalculate than to recall it from swap. So the OS would throw such memory regions instead of swapping out and signal the process about it to recalculate it if needed. I don't usually bump into heavy swap usage except when I wake my laptop from hibernate. I tend to close browsers before hiber…

Both OS X and iOS have the NSPurgeableData class which implements something like this: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Perfor... Edit: Chromium has this: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/base/+/master...

"Discardable memory" doesn't seem to be implemented though, however there is an implementation for "discardable shared memory" [1] which seems to offer this volatile behavior. It uses ashmem_pin_region() and ashmem_unpin_region() for Android, which seems to be the equivalent for iOS's NSPurgeableData. I wonder if it does anything useful for any other OS.

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/base/+/master...

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#65

Post by leni536 »

amelius wrote: post #13
leni536 wrote: post #8

Idea: What if there was an OS interface to mark memory regions as "throwaway"? Throwaway in the sense that it's less costly to recalculate than to recall it from swap. So the OS would throw such memory regions instead of swapping out and signal the process about it to recalculate it if needed. I don't usually bump into heavy swap usage except when I wake my laptop from hibernate. I tend to close browsers before hiber…

> Throwaway in the sense that it's less costly to recalculate than to recall it from swap. Network is slower than disk (is slower than memory). So if "recalculate" means getting it from the internet, then probably getting it from disk is faster in most cases.

I expect that it's easy to rerender webpages but it's wasteful to swap the bitmaps and load them from disk again. I wouldn't expect the browser to throw away data retrieved via network.

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#66

Post by antonycourtney »

Another useful tab manager extension for Chrome is Tabli (http://www.gettabli.com), which I created and submitted as a "Show HN" last October (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10464603). Helps you quickly find tabs you already have open and lets you save and restore windows (collections of tabs) with meaningful names to keep things organized. 100% Free Software (sources on github), respects privacy, and has keyboard shortcuts for efficiency.

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#68

Post by ikeboy »

Sarkie wrote: post #2

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/09/tab-discar...

I don't see any such flag, and about:discards and chrome://discards/ don't work. Has the feature been dropped in Chrome 50, or was it just never implemented for Linux?

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#69

Post by hga »

SeanDav wrote: post #63
insulanian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely interested in the reasons people maintain so many tabs open. What type of workflow you have when you end up with so much stuff open? How do you get back to some of those tabs? Wouldn't it be easier to just google it again when you need it instead of having it lingering around and wasting your HW resources?

I am also a tabaholic, often running 5+ windows, some with many dozens of tabs and some with just a handful. I use them for easy context switching. If I am in programming mode I switch to the relevant window, sometimes a separate window for each language I am programming in at the moment, for games and leisure, a different window, for news and related, yet another, for general internet use, yet another. I tend to use…

BTW. If you have a lot of HN tabs open and you try to reload a session after a restart, you get IP blocked for a short time - another good reason to use Firefox if you like keeping a few HN news tabs open, as it only loads 1 tab and keeps background tabs suspended.

Indeed; frequently I'll just disconnect my computer from the net for the startup period; crude, but it avoids this problem for sites like HN or others with with throttling.

Not that it happens very often to begin with, Chrome is quite stable, mostly I spaz with the keyboard and hit Ctl-Shift-Q when I meant Ctl-Q, something Chrome doesn't allow you to turn off.

Re: The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

#70

Post by basch »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #20
hga wrote: post #12

What I do, when Chrome, or rather, my abuse of it (14 windows, 735 tabs at the moment, Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit on a 32 GiB system) becomes onerous is to go to the task manager and kill groups of tabs taking up "too much" memory, and very occasionally, too much CPU. (I get away with that abuse, which it a bit higher right now because I'm in the process of buying a house, by killing all tabs after launching, and only enabl…

Ah, good, it's not just me! One anecdote - 5 years ago FF was the clear winner for coping with tab abuse. Stable and coped with hundreds of tabs happily, Chrome started crashing pages beyond 50 or so. Now it's the perfect reverse, FF hates a lot of tabs open and Chrome is stable with apparently limitless numbers.

firefox was stable but the chrome/ux hung if a tab hung. googlechrome was always responsive if a tab went berzerk.
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