Hacker News Reader

I am involved in a quite heavy web-based data processing and visualization application (browser regularly consumes 8GB RAM and more for a single tab).

I have to say that you really can see that browsers are not made for this kind of workload, even if Javascript itself might be fast enough, down to very stupid little things (e.g. accidentially pointing your mouse in the debug window to a variable holding a large array risks to freeze the entire browser).

View on HN

Looks like something that can be solved by moving the task to background with [web workers][0].

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers...

At least with Firefox, doing tasks in the background was sometimes quite painful, especially during development. For example, I do some CPU-intensive stuff in the background, close the tab because I noticed a mistake in my code -> background task still runs for several seconds eating CPU and memory until it is killed or finished (I didn't check to be honest) by the browser.

Edit: As with everything related to complex web applications (and I had two or three in my career), it is obvious that the whole environment (client, protocols, languages,...) was never designed for this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com