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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

#71
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…

An extension called 'OneTab' might be of interest to you. You can put hundreds of those tabs into just one that becomes a list, and then save it with the name 'house prosepcts'

I used a combination of OneTab, The Great Suspender, and Evernote. I let The Great Suspender keep my memory footprint down but every week or so I scan through my tabs and throw as many as I can into Evernote with tags. Anything left over I can generate a OneTab page and Evernote that whole page of links at once.

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

#72

Google should acquihire the team and embed it in Chrome. I use tabs as a task list (around 30-50 at a time) and without this tool I wouldn't be on my laptop, I would need a desktop with at least 64GB of RAM...

it's already built into chrome, my canary has been doing it for a while, pretty sure beta and dev do it now too.

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

#73

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 k…

I tried using that, but i keep getting this issue on OS X: https://i.imgur.com/PeZluRL.png

This is not specific to Tabli though, it's every time there is an extension popup with content.

Maybe it's something that can be fixed? Also, the open animation is painfully slow.

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

#74
post #33

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?

They accumulate. Every day there are two or three pages you intend to read later, so you leave them open. A month later, you have an extra 100 tabs loaded. After six months, you have 600. There are also clusters of tabs associated with some research you were doing but didn't quite finish. Then the problem is it would take a couple of days to go through all the waiting tabs and shut them down, and you don't have a cou…

They sure do accumulate, to the point where by the time you go back to some old tab, and that tab just so happen to be replaced with a window.opener trick, [1] there is no chance of you remembering what was there in the first place, and spotting the fake.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11631292

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

#75

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 k…

I tried using that, but i keep getting this issue on OS X: https://i.imgur.com/PeZluRL.png This is not specific to Tabli though, it's every time there is an extension popup with content. Maybe it's something that can be fixed? Also, the open animation is painfully slow.

Thanks for the bug report. I have seen that happen intermittently but have never managed to find a reliable repro. There's a long-standing open issue on github for it: https://github.com/antonycourtney/tabli/issues/45

I have new release of Tabli pending that will address a number of performance issues, so may resolve this for you. If you DM me I can let you know when it's available.

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

#76
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?

Getting back to them is easy. You can do this with 10 virtual desktops, each with 10 windows, and each window with 10 tabs. That allows for 1000 tabs. It's a tree structure, organized by project or other purpose.

Desktops likely map to projects. Windows likely map to web sites. Tabs likely map to web pages within the same site.

A slight variation is that each window represents a Google search, with the first tab being that search. The results get opened in tabs. I often do this, then switch to the other variation by pulling loose a tab that is for a web site with many interesting pages.

The firefox restart dialog, offering to kill individual tabs and/or whole windows as desired, is great. I wish Chromium had it. I wish it were available at all times. I wish it were offered when the browser complains about an unresponsive tab. Chromium's offer to kill a rendering process is pretty useless, since the offer includes one guilty tab and numerous innocent precious tabs.

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

#77
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They accumulate. Every day there are two or three pages you intend to read later, so you leave them open. A month later, you have an extra 100 tabs loaded. After six months, you have 600. There are also clusters of tabs associated with some research you were doing but didn't quite finish. Then the problem is it would take a couple of days to go through all the waiting tabs and shut them down, and you don't have a cou…

Maybe a 'read later' extension could help you? Something longer-term than a tab, but shorter-term than a bookmark.

not going to touch an extension

Extensions tend to break with browser updates. Extensions tend to cause slowness. Nobody wants your bug report if you are running an extension.

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

#78
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They accumulate. Every day there are two or three pages you intend to read later, so you leave them open. A month later, you have an extra 100 tabs loaded. After six months, you have 600. There are also clusters of tabs associated with some research you were doing but didn't quite finish. Then the problem is it would take a couple of days to go through all the waiting tabs and shut them down, and you don't have a cou…

Maybe a 'read later' extension could help you? Something longer-term than a tab, but shorter-term than a bookmark.

That would imply taking a positive action to do something about the tab. I want to just ignore the tab until I need it again. I don't want to treat the tab specially.

My real desk is messy. I mostly know where stuff is buried because I put it there and nobody messes with my desk. I clean it about once a year, usually when a big project is fully done forever. I want the same functionality from my browser.

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

#79
post #72

Google should acquihire the team and embed it in Chrome. I use tabs as a task list (around 30-50 at a time) and without this tool I wouldn't be on my laptop, I would need a desktop with at least 64GB of RAM...

it's already built into chrome, my canary has been doing it for a while, pretty sure beta and dev do it now too.

It hasn't arrived at beta yet but thanks for the heads up!

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

#80
post #51

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?

Heh. First, echoing some other comments, this is a test of these web browsers. My Pale Moon instance (a Firefox fork), which I use much less "actively" and with NoScript running on it, has 42 windows with 2119 tabs, but Firefox is smart about only loading tabs on demand. On the other hand, I have to restart Palemoon regularly, to prevent it from getting unhappy I do so on every even numbered day. I also run a Firefox…

> Firefox is smart about only loading tabs on demand.

This is the second time I've read this today....for me, when FF restarts, the tabs appear to be empty (they are blank, and reload when activated), but all of the memory is consumed almost as if it is somehow pre-allocated even though the page hasn't loaded. Do you not see this behavior?

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