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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Private versus shared memory from chrome://system. I suspect shared doesn't really matter.

I'm using shift+esc task manager, and top to see overall system free ram.

Good catch. All the quoted memory figures are for private memory.

The shared memory figures in the session test (10 tabs and 15 extensions) were all at 0 in both Chrome 55 and 54.

Oh it's the other way around for me. Shared are around 50mb for each extension.

I updated Chrome after checking the RAM usage, same tabs opened as before, this is the change:

Browser 324 MB private, 83 MB shared

Browser 226 MB private, 67 MB shared

Note that often RAM usage goes up as the browser is running longer. A good test would wait the same amount of time after opening the browser to check.

This might be a side-effect of --isolate-extensions (out of process iframes for extensions) being turned on in M55.

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/chromiu...

Actually, we decided to delay --isolate-extensions to M56 to get a few more features working for out-of-process iframes first. It's still on for 50% of beta users, but no Chrome Stable users yet. I'll send a clarification to that earlier PSA, but that means that it wouldn't explain an increase in extension memory usage on Chrome Stable.

> Gmail is using less than 1GB again

Geez. If that's something we need to be happy about, we're doomed.

I quite like OneTab instead of The Great Suspender, more predictable and really straightforward to use : https://www.one-tab.com/

For those who use OneTab I can highly recommend setting a keyboard shortcut for 1) seeing your OneTab list (although that can also be a bookmark), and more importantly, 2) sending the current tab to OneTab.

I had to rediscover how to do this, or OneTab changed in its behavior. You have to go to your extensions screen (Chrome), scroll way to the bottom, and set your shortcuts for extensions there.

Just FYI, as setting extension shortcuts in general wasn't intuitive to me.

Thanks for the info! I had no idea this functionality existed.

I used it way back when and the for about a year I thought the feature had been removed. Was very happy to rediscover it!

What is The Great Suspender?

Suspends tabs after a set period of disuse. Great for people who open a ton of tabs in Chrome.

(To add to the description, from their github readme)

> "The Great Suspender" is a free and open-source Google Chrome extension for people who find that chrome is consuming too much system resource or suffer from frequent chrome crashing. Once installed and enabled, this extension will automatically suspend tabs that have not been used for a while, freeing up memory and cpu that the tab was consuming.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender

Ah Ok I thought it might be an OS utility. Thanks for the tip. I also highly recommend session buddy for excessive tab folks.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac...

chrome already has this behavior built in, start where I left off under settings.

Is this different?

Yep. You can save named sessions so that you can go back in time as needed.

Indeed. Chrome losing tabs after a crash and subsequent session restore is what led me to Session Buddy.

Chrome's session restore silently loses tabs when you have a lot open. It is completely unreliable in my experience. Sometimes a window will come back with half the tabs missing, which is obvious, but when it's only a couple missing, it's much harder to even know.

Also, Session Buddy lets you export sessions to back them up and move them between computers, etc.

If a tab goes missing and you can't tell, did it really matter?

But then you miss out on the new chance at life http://www.theonion.com/article/accidentally-closing-browser...

23? is that a lot? that's about normal for me, and i didn't think i was too bad. my office mate usually has a couple hundred tabs open.

Last time I restarted Firefox, I had over 350 tabs open. Which is ridiculous, of course, because I'm sure that I haven't looked at more than 100 of them today, but since that all fits into 1.2GB of memory (currently), what's the problem.

Meanwhile, I feel like a compulsive hoarder when there are more than 10 tabs open. :)

It's basically like Bartab Plus for Firefox ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-plus/ ) but for Chrome

It is sad that I cant really tell if you are being sarcastic.

Sure memory is cheap vs. developer time, but still.

Cannot imagine him being sarcastic:

around 8gb free out of 16, compared to 1-2gb free previously.

1-2gb only left is something that greatly lowers the quality of developer time.

Are you using Classic Gmail or Google Inbox?

Classic. Can't handle inbox on a computer, only in the app.

Google inbox web app is painfully slow for me

Yep, me too, across all browsers. Really wish they'd streamline it a bit.

I've been using the cross-platform, open-source WMail [1] for a couple of weeks, and I find that it offers a faster and more streamlined experience than using Inbox in Chrome.

[1] http://thomas101.github.io/wmail/

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