Comment by systems_glitch
3 years ago
Yeah, totally possible to get excellent results with older hardware, and really stellar results with very new hardware, if you're running stuff that's not essentially made to be slow.
I basically only upgrade workstations due to web browsers needs, and occasionally because a really big KiCAD project brings a system to a crawl. At this point even automated test suite runtimes are more improved by fixing things that stop test parallelization from working efficiently vs. bigger hardware.
I am constantly dumbfounded with the fact that the majority consumer of memory on my machine is a FN web browser! (that said, I *do* have basically like 30 tabs open at any given time...
(It would be cool if dormant tabs can just hold the URL, and kill all memory requirements when dormant after N period of time..)
But heck, even when I am running a high-end game on my machine, the memory consumption is less than when I have a bunch of tabs open displaying mostly text ...
I have a hundred tabs open in my Firefox. They are structured by Tree Style Tab, and most of them are offloaded by Auto Tab Discard.
This gives me a way to instantly switch between contexts (with a small delay if a tab has to be reinstated from cache). This is how bookmarks should really work.
This us why Firefox is not the biggest memory hog on my system. Most of the RAM is consumed by language servers and Emacs.
Indeed, tab-based navigation has less friction, no need to recreate some other order in another UI, and offloading should deal with resource use (workspaces in Vivaldi also helped reduce the clutter a lot along with tab groups)
I wish Android Firefox was as well behaved, beyond a certain amount of tabs new ones don't really load until I shut some, it's been like that for years, on different phoned and different android versions. The amount I can keep open seems to increase as phones get better.
Small tangent: I wonder what people are seeing when they say they have "too many" tabs open.
I had over 1000 tabs open in Firefox (macOS) and never noticed any problems. (Trying to clear them out. Down to 920 now.) 2.26 GB out of 32.00 GB is used by Firefox. I have about 70 open in Chrome (since only a certain number fit on the screen) and it's split across 12 processes which are between 12 MB and 158 MB each. I have nearly 500 tabs open (because that's the limit) on my iPhone and iPad each, in Safari.
Just curious: what kind of workflow results in having over 1000 tabs open? (Oldschool Unix hobbyist here, so I always feel like drowning when I'm nearing 20+ tabs. :)
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Certain sites are absolute murder. A single wikia (now Fandom) tab or new reddit tab left open can sometimes bring a browser to its knees. I've seen google mail do the same when they screw something up.
edit: That is, I think people sometimes attribute the lag they're experiencing to the number of tabs they have open, when only a handful of their tabs are to blame.
huh... WTF do you have 500 tabs open for?
I usually carry 3 sets of tabs, typically around ~10 each:
Personal info sites, like reddit and its links...
Tech Sites, like HN and its links....
Video Sites, like Nexflix / Prime...
EDIT:
Also - what tab-mgmt extensions do you use? Like Tab Grouping etc...
Also - one of the things I attempted to do, but failed to do so consistently, was to swipe to a different desktop between, work, person, and learning/browsing... instead of tab groups I had "workspaces" but that is a hard habit to build, for me, it seems.
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This is what I see on a linux machine with only 6GB of ram: https://blog.imraniqbal.org/ram/
(TL:DR OOM errors and the kernel starts reaping processes)
Just seems so odd as I remember playing gta vice city on a pentium 3 with 128mb of ram and now I need 6GB+ to just browse the web
Technically, all the bookmarks you have are hibernating tabs.
There's a whole spectrum of activity you can have on a tab, and to me I see really no difference between "unhibernating" a tab and just reloading it from scratch.
Either one is very slow in modern crap software.
Unless it happens under 150ms, it is slow.
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> I had over 1000 tabs open in Firefox
this is me
> 500 tabs open (because that's the limit) on my iPhone
that's my wife
Same, I was around 1500 tabs across three windows when I finally moved from the HP Z420 workstation I'd been using as my primary sometime around JAN 2023. Machine was fine with it.
(It would be cool if dormant tabs can just hold the URL, and kill all memory requirements when dormant after N period of time..)
The problem with this is that a lot of web pages don't handle this gracefully. You don't end up back where you left off!
It would be nice if all the details of the inactive web page were saved to storage, and then retrieved from storage when the tab is reactivated, without having to make any network calls at all.
I turned off JavaScript one day and found my browser memory woes completely evaporated. Now I turn it on per site on a case by case basis and it's easy to figure out which sites leak a lot and prepare accordingly.
Browsers have gotten worse. In..2013, I believe, I regularly had 200+ firefox tabs open on a laptop. It was a high-end laptop, with IIRC 16 gigs of ram, but it was still a laptop. The number may have been much higher than that - I've hit over a thousand tabs before, but I can't recall if that was then or more recently.
Multi-process firefox seems to have absolutely obliterated the performance of firefox with large numbers of tabs until recently (it seems to be have improved).
i think edge and chrome have started doing this recently