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Comment by kintamanimatt | Hacker News Reader

Completely disagree. We've seen too much complacency in recent years when it comes to memory usage. Developers think it's ok for their applications to bloat out and have a huge memory footprint. I'd rather applications were developed in such a way that they were more memory efficient.

I've had a recent incident in which Chrome was consuming about 7GB of memory, just because I had about a hundred tabs open! It was really, really, insane. This reckless disregard for memory usage caused more problems in terms of performance, and it wasn't apparent what was happening until things started OOM'ing. (Swapping is really just as bad as an OOM - the computer's practically useless if it's trashing due to low memory.)

Your ideal situation of having more memory used will, in many cases, lead to degraded performance.

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There's no way you could effectively work with 100 tabs open, and that is surely a smell for inefficiency. For any given task, 5 tabs is probably reaching the upper limit on what's actually _required_, with around 10 being the upper limit.

Granted, you could have multiple tasks ongoing in parallel, but are you really working in parallel at that point? If not, save the tabs and return to them later. I really doubt you are visiting all 100 tabs on a regular basis so as to merit they stay open at all times.

I've seen way too many people use their browser as a sort of todo app, by virtue of "I'll open a tab for this so I don't forget to do it later" -- hell, I do this too -- but that's not at all the intended usage of a browser, and so naturally, it sucks at it.

What can I say? It worked for me. I was doing a lot of research and things I'd read would lead to more searches of tangential topics that I'd want to revisit in the coming hours. This method of working fit my mental model and I was flitting between tabs as necessary, not just opening them up with the hope that I'd read them sometime.

Also, if I need to click on a whole bunch of links that I know I'm immediately going to evaluate, it's faster and easier to click on 50 links in one go than to click, evaluate, close, find my old position, click, evaluate ...! I'm someone that likes to batch tasks because I find it more efficient.

Opening that many tabs isn't something I do every day. I've only got seven open right now, which is normal-ish, but sometimes I need it and I know I'll need it again soon.

(On a side note, I can't really figure out why but I hate the term smell but it triggers a visceral reaction and wish it'd die a horrible death!)

You don't open 100 apps on your computer and then complain about memory usage. Running 100 tabs at the same time, all of which may be running live JS processes, is about the same. It's a perfectly valid usage pattern but it's also going to eat a lot of memory. It's not like driving with your parking brake on, but it's like loading your car up with its maximum passenger capacity and then complaining that it's accelerating more slowly.

I've done it before with earlier versions of Firefox on a system with fewer resources that yielded a substantially lower memory footprint.

It is very possible to do a lot with less memory.

But this has been discussed ad nauseam, and it's unproductive to keep complaining about it. The fact should be obvious, at least by now, that sandboxing uses more resources. If you're fine with that, great! If not, do something to fix it or use a different browser.

It's possible, but there are always competing goals - speed, security, reliability, features, memory usage. When capacity on one is growing quickly (and cheaply), it's not surprising it doesn't get the same priority as some of the others. In particular, I'm not sure how many extra users you'd get by reducing memory footprint versus adding features.

This sounds like it was possibly some time ago. If so, don't discount the effect of having less resource-intensive sites too.

Originally you explained the problem as if you always had 100+ tabs open, but now it sounds like an occasional occurrence. I was mainly speaking to if you always had 100+ open -- as if that was your normal workflow.

I do understand at times you want to open many more than that for a limited time, but those situations (at least in my experience) are typically very short-lived and don't represent my ordinary common usage pattern.

[and yes, smell is supposed to invoke that reaction! a code "smell", or process "smell", etc. is something that stinks, and it should disgust you, and you should work to clean up the 'smell' ASAP! :)]

> Originally you explained the problem as if you always had 100+ tabs open, but now it sounds like an occasional occurrence. I was mainly speaking to if you always had 100+ open -- as if that was your normal workflow.

... because if you do it only occasionally it uses less memory? :-/

> [and yes, smell is supposed to invoke that reaction! a code "smell", or process "smell", etc. is something that stinks, and it should disgust you, and you should work to clean up the 'smell' ASAP! :)]

Yes, Mother.

Guess what? Your preferred workflow is just as smelly. Clean it up.

Tabs have replaced bookmarks as the means of saving stuff for later. Why is that? Because bookmarks require a lot more mental effort to organize and take more effort to delete when you're done with them. Bookmarks also take a lot longer to load than a tab (which is usually loaded already).

Very good point, and touches on a potential piece I'd like to write sometime. Used to, bookmarks were like a collection of good books -- easily filed away, organized, and still as good when you opened them a year later as when you last touched them.

But not anymore. They change. There's tons of them. And organization sucks, though FF isn't as bad as Chrome and IE, but the general paradigm of shortcuts needs to be re-evaluated. I don't like web-based services (for many reasons), and I've yet to find a fitting extension that works for me.

So yeah, I can see how this usage pattern has arisen, but I think the answer is ultimately up to innovation that has sadly yet to occur.

I agree. I regularly have hundreds of tabs open in Chrome, and while I do regularly save things to Chrome bookmarks, I treat it more as a place where I can put something that I won't look at again but there's a 1% chance I'll desperately need to find it at some point in the future and won't be able to find it by Googling.

Also interesting that Chrome never added an option to sync bookmarks to the Google Bookmarks web service.

If the majority of people are using a tool in a particular way, it becomes the tool's responsibility to meet that need effectively. Just because you didn't anticipate the ways that real people would use your technology doesn't mean you get assuage responsibility for its shortcomings because you didn't foresee them.

I'd argue that a majority of users aren't running with 100+ tabs open, though.

I agree it sounds a bit excessive (though I go up to 50 tabs myself often enough), but how is you telling him off about how his way of tab-usage is inefficient in itself in any way relevant to a discussion about browsers memory usage??

I hope you didn't really try to say "there's nothing wrong with browsers' memory usage, as long as you don't stress them too much" ? :) :)

> There's no way you could effectively work with 100 tabs open

I'm sure there's no way you could effectively work that way, but imagining that what's true for you is true for everyone is a massive smell for ignorance of other workflow styles and cognitive abilities.

I regularly maintain over 250 tabs, and use multiple workspaces to manage a very specific and highly efficient workflow. It works incredibly well for me.

I wish browsers would ditch tabs and switch to buffers. Emacs users know just how darn useful it is to keep 500 buffers open, each with fuzzy completion so you can switch to exactly what you want.

just because I had about a hundred tabs open

That is a lot of tabs, though.

Not really, especially if you're doing a lot of research, or for whatever reason the page is particularly complex and it causes the process that tab is running under to consume a lot of memory.

I end up with quite a few tabs open myself. I find if I bookmark a tab, add it to Pocket, or copy the URL into my notes that I'm far more likely to go back and actually read it. Before I would keep tabs open for weeks "just in case".

I can relate, I do the same to keep the tabs open so to read them later. Most of them end of not reading them weeks later. Never use Pocket. Presumably, it's similar to ReadItLater or Instapaper? Perhaps indeed that's better approach.

No, a hundred tabs is still far beyond a lot.

If a hundred tabs is not really a lot, what would be? 250? 1,000?

Whatever the brightline test for "a lot" is, there's no compelling reason each tab should be consuming about 70MB. Under Chrome, each tab runs in its own process, which is certainly a contributing factor. I appreciate this is for stability and security, but it's not the best solution for the problem and has some serious drawbacks, i.e. horrible memory usage.

As I said in another reply to one of your comments, I don't think 70MB is a lot per tab. I'm fairly certain that if you run Firefox 2 for instance it'll use close to that amount for one tab.

The fact that it is its own process is a very small contributor to per-tab memory usage.

tabs are not a replacement for bookmarks, the idea is not to open an ever increasing number of tabs, but rather bookmark and folder things if you need 100 concurrent research tabs. It's just the wrong way to use the browser.

It would be like me arguing that driving my car with the parking brake on makes it get hot, of course it does, it's user error.

Well, no. If you've got all those tabs open and you're flitting between their contents, it's appropriate. It's not the wrong way to use the tool, it's a way to use it that's perfectly appropriate in some cases.

There's no reason I should be fighting against my browser because my optimal workflow causes it to chew through memory!

no. when number of open tabs < 10-20, yes sure, but when that number reaches 100, your doing it all wrong. Its not about how much memory it consumes, that's irrelevant, if you need more memory just go to crucial.com, it's dirt cheap. Its about using the tools properly.

I can't argue the position for this workflow better than I already have. I refute the idea that I'm "doing it all wrong". No, I'm not and this was the only efficient way to get what I needed to do done.

My laptop's motherboard can't handle more than 8GB, so I don't even have the option of putting more RAM in it as it already has 8GB. Also, I shouldn't have to keep throwing in memory to handle applications whose coders feel it is fine and dandy to gobble memory with reckless abandon. Why should I bear the financial cost of a poorly designed application?

I'm most certainly using my tools properly whether you agree or not. I'm not bitching about 5,000 tabs causing excessive memory usage, I'm complaining about 100 which is not that many during research that requires going from page to page, or opening lots of links without having to remember where I was at in each part of my stack; I've got less working memory than my computer!

It wasn't the only efficient way to get what you were doing done. It's ridiculous to say that a hundred tabs is a reasonable use case. The very fact that you ran out of memory tells you that. If you really need 100 concurrent tabs (which you don't) then you need a different computer for your research. However, you're using the browser incorrectly. Why not save the text you want to a document, or out it into a spreadsheet?

10 tabs yes, 100 tabs no!! Stop arguing, even your computer's telling you the same thing :) you're just bent belligerent snd acting like a spoiler child. You're browser can't do, so you maybe should find a different way. As I've suggested.

I also regularly have over 100 tabs open and I find your suggestion that my workflow is wrong is insulting.

Maybe you don't need to have 100 tabs open. Maybe you lack imagination to see scenario where having that many tabs open.

It is also possible that you are aware of some great/better way to solve similar scenarios than me, but I guess you are keeping it a secret, since I regularly evaluate new plugins and extensions, and also search google for tips and tricks, how to do it better. (And to date haven't found a way)

Sure I could work with less tabs. Hell Everything could be done with only 1 tab in 1 window (and I used to in the 90s), but it's not as efficient as what I do now.

Edit: major spelling errors.

"Maybe you lack imagination" - maybe you lack computer skills, it certainly seems so. There are plenty of ways you could avoid having 100 tabs open. However, if you feel like that's something you need then stop whining and buy a machine with enough RAM for your usual use case.

the ideal number of tabs roughly corresponds to the human stack size, plus a couple for on-going apps like gmail. If you need more than that, you should consider a better mechanism than the browser. Since you haven't found any, I posit that its you who lacks imagination. If you found my comment insulting then I am sorry.

I average over a hundred tabs regularly.

Although once the favicons disappear, I usually open a new window, or group windows by subject matter. I've tried to alter my browsing habits over the years to ease the load on my computer, but I've just come to accept that I am just one of those people.

This tool is either the best thing that's ever happened, or it's about to exacerbate my problem 10 fold.

if you have a 100 tabs open, you're using it wrong.

How do you suggest to handle the fact that there are many websites which break the "back" button these days? I've gotten to the point where I open a new tab practically every time I follow a link. Not to mention news sites where you need to open all of the interesting articles that you see before the page updates and they go away.

Well, if you have 100 tabs open, you might be using the wrong browser. Chrome is obviously not designed to work with that many tabs, either from a UI standpoint or, apparently, a memory use standpoint.

However, I don't really see why there needs to be a strict limit on the number of tabs you can have open before your browser starts trashing all your memory. This is a problem that can be solved by designing your software to deal with that use scenario, either by pausing unused pages and serializing the resources to disk or by disposing of the unused pages entirely without removing the tabs. You'd want a pref for this, but it seems entirely reasonable to me.

there isn't a strict limit, its just not a viable use case for current browsers.

Maybe what we need is Chrome/FF to consider the very high tab count as a use case and handle it better, when you have so many tabs it's not easy to find the 1 in 100 that you're looking for, we would need a new find tool, possible the browser should build a client side tf/idf index and make the whole working set (workspace) searchable. You see what I mean? Until the browser changes to support this usecase, the usage will be klunky and fraught with problems.

The Firefox tab bar is naturally more usable than the Chrome tab bar with large numbers of tabs because it scrolls rather than trying to fit them all in the bar. (I sometimes wonder whether squeezing tabs to the point of absurdity was actually a conscious decision by the Chrome developers to limit the number of tabs people can open and thus memory use.) There are a lot of Firefox extensions that add additional tools to manage large numbers of tabs, of which Tree Style Tabs is perhaps the most popular. There are not as many Chrome extensions, since Chrome's UI is not as extensible.

Actually I usually set firefox to squeeze tabs. I love it. As long as the favicon is visible it works fine. Hiding the favicon in small tabs is the real sin of chrome.

I agree. I'm a tab hoarder with hundreds of tabs open in Chrome. I never do that with Firefox's scrolling tabs because I remember where things are based on their place among the other tabs. Firefox doing a min-width on each tab and hiding the rest makes it impossible to find where that other page I looked at 5 minutes ago went.

The design of Firefox makes it able to handle a lot more tabs than Google Chrome. You can easily have two hundred with no sweat.

It also features Panorama built-in, which lets you search through all the tabs. It's as simple as Ctrl+Shift+E, type your keyword.

Huh, I didn't realize you could search. That's neat.

Or, as Apple says, "You're holding it wrong."

You should try the tree tab plugin. Works like a charm.

How is using this tool significantly different than bookmarking then closing all your currently open tabs, which you can easily do now?

Good point, we'll have to see. I have the same problem as the GP (though up to 50 tabs usually) and indeed "bookmark all"+"close all" doesn't really help because if you never review those bookmarks, you tend not to take the step either.

As someone else itt already said, a better solution would be some improved bookmarking system that I can use to just file away a tab, knowing that it'll be there when I need it, as well as offering the option of, I dunno popping up for review in a couple of days or a specific time maybe.

One thing I do not understand is why modern browsers, apart from bookmark-folders do not offer tags as well. They were a hugely successful way of ordering things back in the day and they have all but disappeared for some reason. And they would be tremendously useful in bookmarks (to me). And del.icio.us is dead, plus I don't want a web service to keep my bookmarks, it's too slow.

I'm not sure if I understand your comment. Firefox does allow you to organize bookmarks by tag, and it even lets you use the tag collection as a bookmark folder (meaning that you can add the tag to the bookmark bar and it behaves like a normal bookmark folder.) You can even add different links to different bookmark folders and give them the same tag, so that they appear under the original bookmark folder and under the same tag category, or tag folder if you drag the tag to the bookmark bar. If you decide to remove the tag folder from the bookmark bar, the tag will still exist.

Really? I have to admit never trying FF's bookmark system in depth, just Chrome and Opera. Well then. Thanks for the tip, I will try! (though my zillions-of-tabs problem mostly resides in Opera)

Probably but it's still 70MB per tab.

I agree with you, but 7GB for 100 tabs sounds likes something unusual happened. I usually have around 200-350 tabs open (Yes, I'm hoarding, I'm aware of it). I usually terminate their processes and respawn them when I need them (their state is not lost) but IIRC, when I don't I get around 3GB for 200 Tabs

I've seen this many times, and it seems to depend on the complexity of the page being rendered. I did close and re-open things, much to the same result.

Totally agree. My PC, which needs replacing, only has 2GB of memory, because that's what the motherboard supports.

That doesn't make sense. Motherboard usually support a certain number of memory sticks. You probably have 2x1GB sticks, you can upgrade by replacing them rather than adding additional sticks.

You probably do still have a 32bit system so you're still capped at 4GB of useful memory. I'd still upgrade my system if I were you.

In theory you'd be correct. But some motherboards, even when they're not operating under the constraints of 32 bit addressing, can't handle more than a certain amount of memory. In my case, my laptop's motherboard can only handle a maximum of 8GB.

This is a fairly common problem: http://superuser.com/questions/308310/what-limits-a-motherbo...

1. The memory controller will impose its own limit, which may be less than you'd think.

2. The form factor may also impose a limit. You won't find a DDR stick larger than 1GB, for example.

Of course, if either of those were the cause of a 2GB limit, then you could make the case that the whole system should be upgraded, but that's a lot more expensive than a couple of sticks of RAM.

Sometimes motherboards work fine with more than the advertised supported maximum. It would be worth a shot if you can try with borrowed or return-able RAM.

I don't see how it's a developers' fault that you opened 100 tabs in Chrome. 70MB per tab is really not that much, I don't think browser memory usage has actually gone up by much compared to other applications. I think the fact that it was usable up to that point is a testament to its design, though I personally think Firefox handles large numbers of tabs better overall (UI wise).

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