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Comment by hackathonguy | Hacker News Reader

Wondering if it's just me: I bought an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, based on reports saying that RAM management is much more effective than with Intel CPUs. Ever since, I'm really struggling with load management. I typically have Chrome open with 20-30 tabs, plus a couple of Electron apps (Notion, Slack, Google Calendar), and my MacBook frequently slows down to a crawl or gets stuck entirely. Simple commands - "close all tabs" in Chrome - can take 50 seconds to execute. Is anyone else experiencing the same?

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Anecdotally, the M1 feels very performant with 8gb (I have MBP and Mini 8gb variants) compared to my 16gb Intel MBP and my 32gb Hackintosh.

That said - it’s not magic. 30 tabs in Chrome is a lot if you’re not using a tab suspender extension. But one thing I do notice is that when a Rosetta 2 app is running, the entire machine seems to take a hit. I would check the architecture of your apps and see if you have any x86 apps running.

Seconded. I have 30+ tabs open (though in Firefox), alongside VS Code, Obsidian (a notes app, but with web views), Spotify (web views), and I don't frequently run into serious performance issues.

I do try to avoid Rosetta quite a bit though (right now I have no Intel processes in Activity Monitor).

Also check Messages.app hasn't run away with the CPU. Sometimes it seems to do that :(

Lol 30 tabs is a lot? I'm running 32 gb ram on windows i7-6700 3.4 ghz on mini ATX and currently have 883 tabs open, using marvelous suspender and few other tweaks, but still have 95 windows opens (1 tab typically alive in each window minimum excluding my suspension blacklist...). Also have photoshop, notion, and a few other apps going and am running smoothly at 40-70% cpu utilization and 85% memory...

I think the "if you're not using a tab background suspender" part was important there.

Not sure if Chrome is still this way, but it would allow background tabs to still run things like JS even after hours of not being focused.

why

> using marvelous suspender

Did you even read my comment?

GP does say that the amount of tabs actually running still exceeds the number quoted by GGP

They’re not comparable numbers. 800 tabs with 799 suspended is a different beast than 30 active tabs.

Wow. That would literally send my OCD over the edge. I have a thing about closing all my tabs, reading all my mail, and having nothing on my desktop at the end of the day.

> marvelous suspender

I totally missed that fork of TGS. Glad I saw this comment, as I hated getting rid of TGS.

> 883 tabs open

There cannot be a good reason to do this, I start to get anxious at 20-30

High tabs count are from people who don’t care to close tabs after they’re done or use them as a TODO list they never get to.

Browsers should default to closing unused tabs (after 30 days?) and I’m glad that’s possible now. If you haven’t seen a tab in a month chances are you never will.

I'll have you know that I kept a tab open for 3 months, and only then I ordered the item displayed in that tab.

Yes, tabs as a todo list work. With a tab suspender extension.

> Browsers should default to closing unused tabs

Hey, what if I finally get to whatever interesting thing that tab had after 30 years of ignoring it?!

But yeah, I just "close other tabs" every few weeks because it's 99% guaranteed I won't need them.

> plus a couple of Electron apps

I’m afraid that might be your problem right there :(

I confirm. Embedded nodes each take a few hundreds of megabyte. It looked cool when we had 2 electron apps out there, now with so many of them good by ram.not mentioning apps developed in a few months rather than years, packed with features to become more memory hungry than the OS. MS Team is a particular offender.

Evergreen webviews baked into the OS are the next frontier of desktop app development. They can share a renderer and have much lower memory usage per app as a result - see the changes in Windows 11. Couple that with a lighter weight desktop compatibility shim to break out of the sandbox conditionally (like Tauri does in Rust) and this architecture can be totally fine. The issue isn’t the concept of using web technologies, it’s just the current implementation that was needed to make everything work on our existing platforms.

Mac will be a holdout because they heart native but hopefully will concede at some point because more and more people are going to deploy apps this way from here on out. It’s not worth it to employ native app developers for each platform except for the largest of the large companies.

>It’s not worth it to employ native app developers for each platform except for the largest of the large companies.

Programmers have ported Emacs to the native GUIs for MacOS, Windows and Linux (and 80% of respondents to a recent Emacs survey prefer to use one of those GUIs rather than Emacs's TTY interface), so "largest of the large companies" is going a little too far.

> Programmers have ported Emacs to the native GUIs for MacOS, Windows and Linux

That doesn't mean it would be commercially worthwhile to employ them to do so; volunteers do lots of things that wouldn't worthwhile to employ people to do. OTOH, wanting volunteers doesn't make it happen.

This will never be the same as Electron due to differences in the various rendering engines (e.g, Webkit2/WKWebView/WebView2 all have subtle differences), and this isn't accounting for version differences.

The reason people ship Electron is because Electron is literally the same thing wherever you shove it. You can search on this very forum for comments from the dev who migrated Slack from per-platform-WebViews to Electron.

That’s what I meant by evergreen webviews. I think you missed the point of what I was saying. There are not evergreen webviews cureently. They currently only update webviews on major OS releases. with windows 11 they will ship an evergreen webview for use by Teams and will abandon trident as well. it’s currently a react/electron app that will run in the OS webview on Windows instead of in Electron. This is precisely the reason MS is doing this. Slack was os-specific before evergreen webviews were a thing.

>I think you missed the point of what I was saying.

I don't believe I have, and I believe you're missing the point - much like everyone who says that platform-specific WebViews are the solution to Electron.

Go actually read the comments from the devs who migrated away from WKWebView. What you are describing will not solve what they sought to get away from.

Teams is a horrible abomination on so many levels. fragmented apps, auth, performance, it’s all a mess. Recently they took away the ability to do :emojis:

I believe it just exists to make people suffer

Want to use "apps" that run in a browser. Then just open them in a browser.

That's what I do with Teams, Discord and so on.

Much better than opening many isolated browser runtimes for what's essentially badly optimized webpages.

And if you want the separate window so you can pretend they’re apps, use the “create shortcut” option in the menu.

Electron has higher permissions so you can do things like select your audio inputs in discord which is nicer than the browser selection.

Are they any better than the PWAs?

They have far more extensive permissions like direct filesystem access. It can make some interactions much more fluid or even just possible at all. You couldn't run VS code very well in a browser for example.

Alternatively you can always use a voip client which doesnt need half your systems resources. Picking audio channels was a normal feature decades ago.

>Alternatively you can always use

No I can't. The IM platform is decided for me already so I can not pick something else. And the company will pick the platform with the most features / integrations which is currently Teams.

MacOS drawing a line in the RAM sand at 16GB with most on 8GB will likely encourage programs to be more efficient rather than be a burden to the user. As we have seen with mobile platforms, programs will use as much resources as they are allowed to. Adding more resources does not fix the problem unless the programs are already quite efficient.

> The IM platform is decided for me already so I can not pick something else

then i am not sorry for you.

> And the company will pick the platform with the most features / integrations which is currently Teams.

The company will pick whatever is best suited for the task at hand. my employer in europe chose mattermost on company premises. i can use it with the matterhorn ncurses client and it's a joy to watch it consume 0% cpu time and a negligible amount of memory.

Besides, this was originally about discord, which hopefully no company uses to manage internal communications(?) When not working you are totally free to choose whatever communication infrastructure you want and are not bound to whatever your employer thinks is best.

This is besides the point anyway. The average user does not need more than 8GB of memory to do their average tasks. Everything they do is possible in 8GB which is proven by the fact mobile OSs and ipados do it just fine. The only reason for the average user to have 32gb of ram is because most desktop apps are insanely bloated. If Apple caps the platform at 16gb but most users use 8gb, it means developers will make their platform efficient enough to run well on 8GB since all users and the developers have that amount of ram.

If MS teams does not work properly on the 16GB macbook then you report a bug and they will fix it but if it doesn't work on a regular PC it is more likely they will tell you to just get one with more ram.

Yes you can, discord client: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

And I also use Mumble from time to time.

"Discord Helper (Renderer) - Not Responding".

Can anyone explain to me the psychology of having 30 tabs open? Why not just bookmark the URLs to an ephemeral folder or something? Having more than 10 tabs open is beyond stressful for me, and honestly I can’t see how having more open would make anyone more productive. Really curious to learn about other workflows and excessive tab use is one I’m morbidly curious about.

Personally on my phone and work computer I keep legion number of tabs open. On my phone, it’s because using bookmarks is slower than opening the tab menu. Plus the OS will swap out tabs that haven’t been used in a while

With a work perspective in mind I have one window set up per task, I use tree style tabs on Firefox, and at a glance I can see the complete context of a task I’m researching, just from the decision tree the tab branches show. Every potentially interesting link that’ll help me with my task gets opened on a branch below the parent, then reviewed and filtered. This is tremendously useful when it comes to writing up documentation or updating tickets and the like.

Bookmarks are like a bin things get thrown into and completely forgotten about. I open a bookmark maybe once a week, and then it's usually for something like accessing the wifi router, or a bookmarklet for adapting a web site.

Tabs are like a TODO list. If something needs to have attention paid to it, and then dismissed, I open a tab for it.

(Of course, I use Firefox & Tree Style Tabs. I find Chrome almost unusable due to its tabbing idiom.)

Interesting.

I’d never be able to use Tabs as todos because I personally use tabs very ephemerally. Closing out of chrome with 3 profiles and 10 tabs each open is nothing to me because I don’t care what tabs are open. If they’re important links then I’ve already written them down in Roam and/or bookmarked them.

question - how do you find anything? Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve never used tree tabs, but finding the link you used last week or last month to complete a task sounds like a nightmare without bookmarking it. Contrast this with my workflow, which doesn’t rely on tabs, and I can easily find it in my notes in less than 10 seconds.

Firefox suggests open tabs by default when typing in the address bar.

Tabs are like temporary bookmarks. I use 1 window per task and usually open links in new tabs. I don't need to do anything to pause a task: simply minimize the window and the tab unloader extension does the work of automatically keeping my RAM from overflowing.

When returning to the task, I just focus the window and instantly have a picture of my previous progression. In case of a computer crash or restart, it's been years since the Firefox session restore function ever failed me. That step in booting up the computer is quite painful though, the browser can take a good 60 seconds to restore the previous session.

When I'm done with a task for good, I just close the window. Workspaces help in keeping my Taskbar and Alt+Tab workflow clean as well. I often have 1000+ tabs "open".

30 tabs is like 30 apps. Once might be a word processor, texting, image editor, etc...

How can you do research without going beyond 10 tabs? I typically go horizontal. If i'm trying to solve problem, will middle click on top 5 results etc and go through them until problem solved. Then there is research on various topics that require deep dives into papers, those papers then have citations that require other papers or open up other queries. Then going through email generate various links that I need to see, via google alerts, groups etc, and that doesn't even get started with links generated out of hn/reddit etc. How do you get away with less than 10 tabs? I also use multiple tab managing plugins not just for memory, but for searching between open tabs, and then to manage and collapse entire windows etc...

My workflow for research is like this:

- open link, determine if it’s relevant or not. If it’s relevant, but not relevant right now, I’ll dump it into my notes.

- then I close the tab. Pretty simple.

- when the time comes where that link is relevant again, I’ll find it in my notes and open it.

- I really don’t find any value in having tabs open that aren’t immediately relevant to what I’m doing. 10 seems like the upper limit of focus for me.

> I really don’t find any value in having tabs open that aren’t immediately relevant to what I’m doing. 10 seems like the upper limit of focus for me.

It's clear that you do understand the value of preserving tabs that aren't immediately relevant to what you're doing. What's the difference in value between writing tabs in your notes and simply not closing them?

I'd understand if there weren't tree-style tabs - you can organize things better in your notes. There are tree-style tabs, though, so you can organize your tabs as you need them, and dropping into a root node is just like dropping into an old thought process.

I'm not the OP, but I almost never have a lot of tabs open, because to me "keep multiple windows each with dozens of tabs open" isn't organization any more than "keep dozens of icons on your desktop" is organization. Some people love that, but I can't find anything that way. And every implementation of tree-style tabs I've seen is -- again, to me, personal preference, YMMV, fill in your favorite disclaimer -- a hot mess. More to the point, it's still "keep multiple windows each with dozens of tabs open wait don't close the window reflexively OH NO YOU CLOSED IT FLAIL FLAIL UNDO HIT THE HISTORY UN-ERASER BUTTON WHEW IT'S BACK". Jesus. No. OMG stop.

Seriously, though, it's just a different way of working. If I want to save a link because I'm genuinely going to need it later, I save the link. More often than not, it just goes in the drafts or annotations for the article that I'm working on at that moment. If not, I save it in GoodLinks, where I get a title and a summary and tagging and syncing across my laptop and desktop and iPad.

I get that I'm an anomaly these days, and that "if you have less than 50 tabs open across three windows you're an amateur" is the norm among technonerds. (That is an actual quote from a friend.) But I am pretty sure the Venn diagram of the all-the-tabs-all-the-time folks I know and the "which tab is it? nope, nope, nope, I'm sure it's here somewhere" folks I know is essentially a perfect circle.

> What's the difference in value between writing tabs in your notes and simply not closing them?

Well, one is indexed, searchable, tagged, and available whenever and wherever I want.

The other is ephemeral and maybe, hopefully I can find it and maybe hopefully I didn’t close it out, and maybe hopefully I remember the name so I can find it in my search history.

Managing tabs with useful info instead of writing them down sounds like a living nightmare.

I drag excess tabs into their own windows to group them by subtopic. Too many tabs makes it too hard to track what all the tabs are. When there are more than 2 windows of 10 tabs I’ll move over to collecting and grouping annotated links in notes.

Someone else in this thread was bragging about having more than 800 tabs open

Hmm. I’ve never ran into that myself and I’ve used a lot of swap on my 8gb M1 Air, so you may be running into another issue, but one thing I have noticed is that performance is far better with native Apple apps. I switched to using Slack in the browser and Safari as my main browser and battery life and performance have been amazing.

Nope. Got the 8gb too. I have xcode, firefox, safari, mail and a lot more. No issues, apart from xcode because it sucks, and has sucked for years.

Chrome is your problem.

Are you using an AdBlock? If not, maybe that's why Chrome is struggling. All these adverts eat resources like crazy.

> "Simple commands - "close all tabs" in Chrome - can take 50 seconds to execute."

Open Activity Monitor and keep an eye on the memory pressure graph, as well as checking for individual apps that are running away with huge amounts of memory. Also, make sure your SSD isn't too full, as pressure on the NVM will reduce swap performance!

M1 Macs certainly seem to "do more with less" than Intel Macs, but as another poster said, they're not magic. Paging in and out vast amounts of swap will still eventually cause performance issues.

I don't have an M1, but on my computers I find Chrome to be memory heavy and rather slow.

It's worth trying out Firefox and seeing if that works better for you.

I have an 8GB M1 MBP. Photoshop, Lightroom, Resolve, Sublime, Chrome (50+ tabs), Transmit, etc and it's almost always very fast. Only slows down if importing to Lightroom and generating previews, or rendering video from Resolve.

Well it definitely is more efficient but RAM is still RAM… Swapping whole 8 gigs will make your system sluggish no matter what. I feel like 8GB is fine if your usage is really light, but swapping more than 70% will slow it down extensively. On the other hand there is a whole camp of people who run heavy dev suites on 8GB and don’t have these issues, so it might really be a faulty line. It’s the first version in the end.

The 8GB M1 I bought was constantly fighting the limited RAM, so I exchanged it for a 16GB model, which has been perfect. For those looking, the MicroCenter near me has 16GB MacBook Air models available at a discount, other MicroCenter locations might have the same.

Same here (although it’s more like 200 open tabs across 10 virtual desktops). It still feels slower than my cheap Atom netbook, but the battery life and hardware quality more than makes up for it.

This might be an opportunity to tweak my browsing habits.

How do you even split windows/tabs across that many desktops? I mean “logically”. Are you working on 10 different things in any given day/week?

A laptop display is too small to see more than a single window. I always make my windows full screen.

For example right now I have the following windows/desktops:

0. Google Calendar + Gmail

1. Facebook Messenger

2. YouTube (music/podcast)

3. Terminal

4. Visual Studio Code

5. Documentation (5-10 tabs)

6. Google Colab

7. Google Cloud Console

8. Google Sheets + Docs

7. Wikipedia (20+ tabs)

8. Google Search (30+ tabs)

9. Hacker News (20+ tabs)

I feel like I am the only one who doesn't hoard browser tabs like everyone I read here. Why 20-30? Why not close the unnecessary stuff or bookmark if that's important?

Memory management certainly feels pretty sluggish on my similarly configured Air. I'm holding out hope for a 64-gig model if Apple really wants to challenge my desktop.

Yes. The M1 is not magic. Or at least it has limits.

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