Wow. My normal session now leaves me with around 8gb free out of 16, compared to 1-2gb free previously. Gmail is using less than 1GB again. I might even disable The Great Suspender, and stop killing tabs that use up lots of memory.
Whoever worked on this, you deserve a raise. QOL improvements for so many people.
For me the situation is perhaps not quite as clear cut. On the one hand I'm seeing nice improvements in the large memory hogging tabs. For example a typical reddit thread was reduced from 399 MB down to 295 MB.
On the other hand, it appears all extensions now have a >50MB memory usage floor. For example, the Authy extension was using 5MB under Chrome 54. It's now using 55MB on Chrome 55. Similarly the simple archive.is button extension went from 5MB to 55MB. That's a lot of RAM for spartan functionality.
For the record, I'm using the chrome://system/ page to compare before and after.
That said, it may be possible the additional memory usage for extensions may be a reporting change as opposed to an actual memory increase. Unsure either way.
Chrome can't even begin to compare to Firefox when it comes to handling anything >10 tabs, which is I think what 99% of people max out at, so Chrome doesn't bother about the rest even though people have been begging for years.
- no multiple tab rows
- when you launch, it reloads every single tab vs loading only the active one (the only sane option), causing massive slowdown and network traffic
- as a result in Firefox you can have 100's of tabs, open the browser, work in a few and close, without affecting anything.
- Firefox had Tab groups, an awesome visual representation, before they made it optional due to everyone copying Chrome's limited feature set.
- Chrome still uses much more memory
- Firefox extensions are by design much more powerful. e.g. Session Manager. And things like Tree style tabs etc.
Firefox easily handles upwards of 50 tabs while Chrome keeps crashing most of the times for me and takes up a lot of load time.
FF extensions are really great compared to Chrome (apart from some Chorome Apps). My only remaining gripe with Firefox is the tab spinning problem (it seems to improve after every new build. I'm on nightly.).
I have recently been running FF in parallel with Chrome. If I'm using non-Google properties, that don't use bad extensions, I quite like using FF. It's not quite as stable, but it "feels" faster and lighter.
Great news! A simple weather website, with about 1 MB worth of actual content (text, markup, images, layout) now only uses 250 MB of memory. And it only takes a few seconds to load on a 100Mbps+ connection whenever I click a menu item (that's with all ads and tracking blocked and most of the stuff already cached).
I'm sorry, I just don't see any reason to celebrate.
They mentioned that weather.com crashed their website. Their website is always extremely slow for me as well. It's ridiculous how poorly designed their website can be for such a simple service.
Note you can click the controls at the top right of the graph and add/remove elements. The graph is a bit heavy, but that may be necessary to generate the visualization.
awesome news then, chrome really needs to improve memory usage, especially when I have lots of tabs open.
under firefox I normally had 120 tabs open all the time, and it's fine. with chrome, I dare not to exceed 60 tabs. chrome triggers heavy swap all the time still, which renders the system very sluggish.
My laptop has no ssd. This sluggishness brings back memories of linux trashing the swap partition when it ran out of memory back in the early 2000s. Quite understandable since back then most people don't have that much RAM (64Mb?). Nowadays I have 8Gb on my laptop and I run linux with swap disabled. The only disk trashing that I'm having nowadays is due to chrome, and it's definitely not due to swap but the effect is almost the same - at best the laptop is unusable for up to 30 seconds, at worst, I have to do a hard reboot because that's the only way to recover - I can't even switch to a new terminal to kill chrome. Attempts to log in via the tty console (Ctrl+Alt+F2) in order to kill chrome is futile. I could enter the username, but the password prompt took forever to appear. Most of the time it expires after 60 seconds. If I manage to enter the password, the shell prompt can take forever to appear.
Nowadays I do a "killall chrome; sleep 2; killall chrome" whenever it starts to trash the disk and giving me the bad vibe.
This is mainly because Chrome allocates a process for each page whereas FF only allocates a thread. The important factor being that threads share an address space where processes are allocated their own and thus consume more memory. Separate processes are arguably more secure and of one process crashes it does not take down the whole browser but all this comes at a cost. This cost is very apparent with many tabs open.
I made a simple firefox/chrome extension for people that horde tabs as temp bookmarks. You might find it useful to find tabs and quickly navigate to them by clicking on the link in the list. It's free and open source. The github page has a gif showing usage. You can also type cmd-shift-e or ctrl-shift-e to switch to it.
I too keep a lot of tabs open. I use OneTab and The Great Suspender chrome extensions to also keep memory usage under control. They've been indispensable tools for the tab hoarders like me.
Also, if you are not yet using 64-bit Chrome, you really should. It is more stable and avoids internal "out of memory" errors individual tabs can sometimes return. Not the default Chrome for some reason!
This is only for low memory devices. From the linked article -
"All the improvements discussed above reduce the Chrome 55 overall memory consumption by up to 35% on low-memory devices compared to Chrome 53. Other device segments will only benefit from the zone memory improvements."
If they didn't, then that would mean development on Electron had stopped. Or that the Electron team needs to remove these features in their fork, and considering how much grief Electron's RAM usage gets, I don't see that happening.
Same thing for me, but only on my 2011 MBP. My girlfriend's 2012 MBP doesn't do it, and neither does my work 2015 MBP. I think it might be related to Chromecast, because that's the only difference between each of those browsers aside from hardware.
Do you have any extensions like that might be causing it?
More exciting news coming in Chrome 56 with complete optimization.. V8 can optimize the entirety of the JavaScript language. Can't wait for Christmas presents
That is welcome change, I already switched to Opera and happy with it, but we really need a lot of choices always and that is why I welcome this change.
[+] [-] ikeboy|9 years ago|reply
Whoever worked on this, you deserve a raise. QOL improvements for so many people.
[+] [-] wamatt|9 years ago|reply
On the other hand, it appears all extensions now have a >50MB memory usage floor. For example, the Authy extension was using 5MB under Chrome 54. It's now using 55MB on Chrome 55. Similarly the simple archive.is button extension went from 5MB to 55MB. That's a lot of RAM for spartan functionality.
For the record, I'm using the chrome://system/ page to compare before and after.
That said, it may be possible the additional memory usage for extensions may be a reporting change as opposed to an actual memory increase. Unsure either way.
[+] [-] pmlnr|9 years ago|reply
Geez. If that's something we need to be happy about, we're doomed.
[+] [-] renaudg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bogomipz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geon|9 years ago|reply
Sure memory is cheap vs. developer time, but still.
[+] [-] dexwiz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tooFastFuckYou|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dirkg|9 years ago|reply
- no multiple tab rows
- when you launch, it reloads every single tab vs loading only the active one (the only sane option), causing massive slowdown and network traffic
- as a result in Firefox you can have 100's of tabs, open the browser, work in a few and close, without affecting anything.
- Firefox had Tab groups, an awesome visual representation, before they made it optional due to everyone copying Chrome's limited feature set.
- Chrome still uses much more memory
- Firefox extensions are by design much more powerful. e.g. Session Manager. And things like Tree style tabs etc.
[+] [-] hashhar|9 years ago|reply
FF extensions are really great compared to Chrome (apart from some Chorome Apps). My only remaining gripe with Firefox is the tab spinning problem (it seems to improve after every new build. I'm on nightly.).
[+] [-] sargun|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barnacs|9 years ago|reply
I'm sorry, I just don't see any reason to celebrate.
[+] [-] niij|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|9 years ago|reply
Or just go to http://wttr.in/
[+] [-] hackuser|9 years ago|reply
https://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast...
Note you can click the controls at the top right of the graph and add/remove elements. The graph is a bit heavy, but that may be necessary to generate the visualization.
[+] [-] radicalbyte|9 years ago|reply
Same trick works for many sites, particularly old media (TV, newspapers, content spam etc).
[+] [-] codegeek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oxide|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausjke|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausjke|9 years ago|reply
under firefox I normally had 120 tabs open all the time, and it's fine. with chrome, I dare not to exceed 60 tabs. chrome triggers heavy swap all the time still, which renders the system very sluggish.
[+] [-] nazri1|9 years ago|reply
Nowadays I do a "killall chrome; sleep 2; killall chrome" whenever it starts to trash the disk and giving me the bad vibe.
[+] [-] jcoffland|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weaksauce|9 years ago|reply
Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...
Firefox Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
source code: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
Let me know if you find it useful or have any suggestions. (patches are awesome too)
[+] [-] kilroy123|9 years ago|reply
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
It freezes your tab after a set amount of time, freeing up the memory for each tab.
[+] [-] thejay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiousgal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reactor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reactor|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Tempest1981|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smegel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dirkg|9 years ago|reply
"All the improvements discussed above reduce the Chrome 55 overall memory consumption by up to 35% on low-memory devices compared to Chrome 53. Other device segments will only benefit from the zone memory improvements."
[+] [-] hemancuso|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richdougherty|9 years ago|reply
https://v8project.blogspot.co.nz/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optim...
[+] [-] stemcc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spacehacker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kfrzcode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbrock|9 years ago|reply
Excited for electron + node to get this improvement.
[+] [-] amelius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edblarney|9 years ago|reply
It's 2016.
[+] [-] Rumudiez|9 years ago|reply
Do you have any extensions like that might be causing it?
[+] [-] pitaj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjain15|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desireco42|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olegkikin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leeoniya|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrija|9 years ago|reply