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0 pointsredwall_hp4y ago0 comments

And...modern web cruft is a memory hog. Chrome's built in task manager shows the tab I'm writing this comment in as using a reasonable 50MB of memory. Meanwhile, I have a couple of YouTube tabs that are over 200MB each.

The problem is the world doesn't hold web developers responsible for being wasteful.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

int_19h4y ago· 2 in thread

The entirety of the HN Add Comment page is 82 lines of HTML (that's after pretty-printing it!) - two tables, and a form with a text area. The only image is the logo. Granted, there's also 175 lines of CSS linked from that, and 150 lines of JS (which does not use any libraries or frameworks).

How did we get to the point where 50 Mb to maintain this document structured in memory and ready to render is considered reasonable?

bduerst4y ago

I mean, the answer is pretty obvious. HN itself isn't a business, it's an organization's forum for a different type of revenue stream.

You could argue that the entire internet (or all media, for that matter) should be run that way, but then we'd still lose a lot of functionality and creativity, even if it were generated for-profit.

int_19h4y ago

I'm not holding HN up as a stellar example. I'm asking why we need 50 Mb of RAM to render a webpage that is this simple. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that browsers could handle back when the average size of the entire RAM was less than that.

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