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0 pointsDaiPlusPlus8y ago0 comments

A lot of the memory usage in modern browsers is from aggressive caching - computers today have multiple gigabytes of RAm that would otherwise go unused, so browser vendors keep more assets in memory between pageloads to avoid reloading them from the disk cache or worse: the network.

Operating systems themselves take advantage of this abundance of memory by also keeping things in-memory for longer - I remember my beefy 2GB/RAM computer from 10 years ago still paged processes and data out to disk when I had Photoshop CS and Firefox 2 side-by-side, but now that I have 32GB of RAM - and have done for the past 2+ years, I csnnot recall having experienced any disk-thrashing due to paging since then.

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mysterydip8y ago

The problem is the myriad of low end devices for sale that many consumers buy. Check out all the sub-$300 notebooks and you'll be lucky to find 4GB of RAM. So while 32GB is available today, I wouldn't call it the norm.

adrianratnapala8y ago

And the probability that you can successfully read a web page out of local cache (whether memory or disk) when the internet connection is down is far less than in the '90s. And this in the brave new mobile-first world.

Bartweiss8y ago

I do think it's a mistake to look at high memory usage and immediately assume the software causing it is bad.

There's basically no downside to using otherwise-inert memory, so plenty of programs will eat whatever memory you have but degrade nicely when you're out. Hell, several IDEs seem to cache their tab contents just because they can, and that's only a text file on disk. If my memory usage never drops below 70% of available, I have no real complaints.

Of course, there is the question of why that much memory usage is even possible. I don't blame Chrome for eagerly caching webpages - it's delightful when I'm on shaky internet and pages don't reload every time I change tabs. But I do object to whoever decided a Blogger tab should have 750 MB worth of crap to cache in the first place.

I increasingly feel like many webpages are actively hostile to their users; in service to click rates and advertisers they eat bandwidth, squander memory, and actively oppose security measures like adblocking and SSL enforcement. That, at least, seems like a step backwards.

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