The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs (opens in new tab)

They accumulate. Every day there are two or three pages you intend to read later, so you leave them open. A month later, you have an extra 100 tabs loaded. After six months, you have 600. There are also clusters of tabs associated with some research you were doing but didn't quite finish.

Then the problem is it would take a couple of days to go through all the waiting tabs and shut them down, and you don't have a couple of days to spare.

Eventually you just save them all out as a session and start again, and hope you will learn from your mistakes ;-)

I've switched from FF/Chrome to FF/Vivaldi because it has much better ways to handle tabs and bookmarks than Chrome does. Vivaldi does tab stacking, for example.

Heh.

First, echoing some other comments, this is a test of these web browsers. My Pale Moon instance (a Firefox fork), which I use much less "actively" and with NoScript running on it, has 42 windows with 2119 tabs, but Firefox is smart about only loading tabs on demand. On the other hand, I have to restart Palemoon regularly, to prevent it from getting unhappy I do so on every even numbered day. I also run a Firefox instance with 12 windows and 62 tabs.

The workflow is roughly:

Windows cover one or a related set of subjects. I know by position which are were, and hit specific tabs at regular schedules. Any site I hit multiple times a day has its window on that tab.

Additional tabs are of course things to get back to. Maybe to digest at a later time, maybe only if an issue is still relevant. I do regularly archive whole windows or most of them using Session Buddy or Session Manager for Firefox/Palemoon.

For me, this sort of spacial navigation works a lot better than any bookmark system or the like that i've seen. I have very very good 3D spacial ability (organic chemistry was easy), so I'm sure that's a major factor in why this is right for me and wouldn't be right for many others.

And at this very moment those hardware resources are for the wasting, at some point after I buy my house, move into it, and my life is 1/10 as crazy as it is now I hope to e.g. be running serious and hungry proof assistants and other stuff, circumstances right now have me using it for little more than a media machine, with the web most certainly being a media. Heck, at this moment, I have one almost as capable machine with 16 GiB only hosting a LTO-4 tape drive.

ADDED: this is on a stationary workstation, so all the problems that might crop up with limited mobile connectivity or screens less than 1080p with a 24 inch diagonal. NEC still makes some fine monitors with very long warranties.

I am also a tabaholic, often running 5+ windows, some with many dozens of tabs and some with just a handful. I use them for easy context switching. If I am in programming mode I switch to the relevant window, sometimes a separate window for each language I am programming in at the moment, for games and leisure, a different window, for news and related, yet another, for general internet use, yet another.

I tend to use Firefox, with its default behaviour of only loading tabs that are active (a huge memory saver) and easy use of NoScript. I also use Great Suspender for Chrome to try control its excessive memory use - works well.

BTW. If you have a lot of HN tabs open and you try to reload a session after a restart, you get IP blocked for a short time - another good reason to use Firefox if you like keeping a few HN news tabs open, as it only loads 1 tab and keeps background tabs suspended.

I have tried active session managers but after several problems with corruption of sessions I reverted back to multiple windows and tabs.

Getting back to them is easy. You can do this with 10 virtual desktops, each with 10 windows, and each window with 10 tabs. That allows for 1000 tabs. It's a tree structure, organized by project or other purpose.

Desktops likely map to projects. Windows likely map to web sites. Tabs likely map to web pages within the same site.

A slight variation is that each window represents a Google search, with the first tab being that search. The results get opened in tabs. I often do this, then switch to the other variation by pulling loose a tab that is for a web site with many interesting pages.

The firefox restart dialog, offering to kill individual tabs and/or whole windows as desired, is great. I wish Chromium had it. I wish it were available at all times. I wish it were offered when the browser complains about an unresponsive tab. Chromium's offer to kill a rendering process is pretty useless, since the offer includes one guilty tab and numerous innocent precious tabs.

It's pretty simple really.

I have a branching factor > 1.0 which means for every tab I open, upon reading that tab, I find at least one more interesting link, and up another tab comes.

It would converge to infinity if my computer didn't crash in a manner causing chrome to be unable to reload, or I didn't periodically hit chrome bugs in the O(1000)'s tab range.

Several projects underway at once, each in its own virtual desktop. Each desktop might have two or three browser windows open, each with several tabs.

As I tire of one project I switch desktop to another that's more aligned to my frame of mind.

I don't tend to kill old browser windows because they serve as a refresher to remind me where I'd got to with a certain problem, or a particular research issue. Only when I've reached some sort of resolution do I kill tabs or even whole browser windows.

Those tabs sure mount up.

Occasionally I try a different workflow but I gravitate to this habit. It seems to work for me.

For me, I open a new window for each task I have to do in the morning, and the tabs associated with each one, then the inevitable stack overflow and msn pages pile up as I finish them

For me it's like a short-term bookmarking system with a more convenient UX.

Personally I have both working fine with hundreds of tabs, but chrome uses 5-10 times the ram.

firefox was stable but the chrome/ux hung if a tab hung. googlechrome was always responsive if a tab went berzerk.

Anybody knows what changed in Firefox?

I used a combination of OneTab, The Great Suspender, and Evernote. I let The Great Suspender keep my memory footprint down but every week or so I scan through my tabs and throw as many as I can into Evernote with tags. Anything left over I can generate a OneTab page and Evernote that whole page of links at once.

I tried that one, and it is indeed good, but see my other reply about how spacial organization works best for me. One Tab just didn't hit the sweet spot my normal system achieves, again, for me.

ditto!

AFAIK this is part of the TRIM project in Blink, They have some memory related goals listed here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17wW-YosF8tlEwn45eZ4d...

Agreed. It would also be nice to limit the number of separate processes that Chrome uses.

It's interesting to compare RAM/resource usage of a blank page in Google Docs in Chrome with a lightweight program such as Microsoft Word ;-)

> Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

This is just ignorant cliche.

> Gmail has an internal behavior that adapts its memory usage on available memory. It may fail in some specific situation (short and wide memory leak), but as a whole the idea is to use RAM as much as possible to make gmail faster.

This has nothing to do with Gmail, this is entirely to do with chromium. When my X-Server starts to freeze because 8 tabs taking up 2GB of memory means the OS is intensely swapping to and from disk; I'll take my unused RAM, thanks.

This always drives me mad. It's particularly bad if I'm trying to read content sites on a train or somewhere with patchy reception - open half a dozen tabs to give me something to read while I'm disconnected, and then switch to them only to see the content disappear before my eyes. I'd nominate it as literally the worst thing about mobile browsing

I thought that would do it but when you understand how you (I, at least) browse the web this feature became annoying, fast.

Working on Nitrous IDE, take a break to read an article (on a page never before visited so not whitelisted). Check the Disqus comments, the article mentions a book on Amazon, check that out....oh no, my IDE page has just gone to sleep, now I have to reconfigure it again. Ah the article page went to sleep too, now I need to find where I am in the comments.

Throw in the time for the pages to reload as well, and you can see how this could get frustrating.

There was also this in 2009: http://lwn.net/Articles/340080/

"Discardable memory" doesn't seem to be implemented though, however there is an implementation for "discardable shared memory" [1] which seems to offer this volatile behavior. It uses ashmem_pin_region() and ashmem_unpin_region() for Android, which seems to be the equivalent for iOS's NSPurgeableData. I wonder if it does anything useful for any other OS.

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/base/+/master...

local network is faster than disk.

The internet is rarely faster than disk unless you're in a major data centre.

And then... this is assuming you're referring to spinning rust. local disks in the form of SSDs will be faster again.

I expect that it's easy to rerender webpages but it's wasteful to swap the bitmaps and load them from disk again. I wouldn't expect the browser to throw away data retrieved via network.

Thanks for the bug report. I have seen that happen intermittently but have never managed to find a reliable repro. There's a long-standing open issue on github for it: https://github.com/antonycourtney/tabli/issues/45

I have new release of Tabli pending that will address a number of performance issues, so may resolve this for you. If you DM me I can let you know when it's available.

It hasn't arrived at beta yet but thanks for the heads up!

> Combo it with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa.... that lets you organize your tabs into groups and you can have hundreds of well organized tabs without using much memory at all.

Be careful with that because every tab has a constant memory consumption even when not loaded, so it will actually have a noticeable memory consumption when you have several hundreds of tabs. I learned it the hard way.