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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

Or chrome. Need 64gb option to run both.

I honestly can't tell if you're being serious.

I'm using a 6/7 year old ASUS with 8gb of RAM. It has no problems running 20 Chrome tabs, Slack, Spotify, VSCode all at once. Are these programs really pushing people's laptops that hard, or is my laptop some kind of weird mega-performer?

While they do chew any ram available. It is an over exaggeration.

I'm always confused why my experience never matches that of others in this arena. I run bare i3 and NeoVim. When I add Slack, Chrome and Spotify, I often see 12 Gigs of usage after a couple of days. Most of the time it comes down to Chrome's tabs... and Slack appearing to be leaky. I've recently started using an extension for Chrome which puts my tabs to sleep and frees the memory they were using. But still, I'm sitting at 8.33 Gigs of RAM used.

Chrome is bad with memory if you’re a tab hoarder, and some extensions can also be problematic. They have an update in the pipeline which will dramatically decrease memory use for background tabs.

I haven’t really seen the memory problems with slack, but we use the free slack without extensions. Maybe it has a similar problem with extensions?

Or Firefox. (writing this from Firefox on Thinkpad with 16GB of RAM)

funny thing: firefox is using ~433mb of ram with ~15 tabs (including gmail, graphql playground, youtube).

slack alone is using 300mb. discord is using another 300mb.

I just checked mine my slack because I thought 300mb was too low for slack, mine is using 68mb, it used to chew like 1gb... Did they optimize it or something.

No optimisations here: Slack is using VIRT: 24.868g, RSS: 1.919g, SHR: 526924

Next highest single process is Firefox with 1G RSS and 5G Virt. I have 113 tabs open at the moment, although there's about 4G of RSS in "Web Content" processes which are firefox related.

Just curious, how many extensions do you have? I'm trying not to bloat my browser too much with them, but have 3-4 privacy related extensions and a couple of utility ones. Right now I have 22 tabs and Firefox uses 5-6 GB of RAM. Restart decreases RAM usage, but Firefox slowly eats RAM again.

I remember recently I freed 10GB of RAM just by restarting Firefox. I literally looked at Ubuntu's System Monitor. And I keep everything updated.

Tried to play with settings in about:config, made even worse and reset.

i'm using firefox nightly, with just a handful of extensions. vim vixen, lastpass, ublock origin and simple tab groups.

that's on linux, latest nightly.

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