sound of mechanical HDD churning

...are, and I'll catch up on...

disk I/O LED is on solid

...all of them when...

"Tabs Unresponsive" window briefly flashes opens for 343rd time today, then disappears after one second

...my computer's a little more...

everything I've just blindly typed finally appears in the textarea, all at once (oh hey no typos!)

...responsive, and I can smoothly...

renderer stalls again and I return to blindly typing

...use my computer to actually read through and close everything.

--

I have a MASSIVE MASSIVE HUMONGOUS SO INCREDIBLY ANNOYING problem with modern tabbed browsing: tabs are processes. This reeks of 1970s-era software design.

This disasterous model makes switching between large numbers of open tabs impossible unless you have an industrial-workstation-class machine. You know, >=24 cores, >=64GB RAM.

...Coincidentally (or perhaps not), the kind of machine Chrome is developed on. :/

I only have 8GB RAM, and, as I noted before, a mechanical HDD which is not especially fast.

I have upwards of fifty screenshots of my load average skating around the 30-40 mark, solely because of Chrome swapping.

I've also had Chrome swap to disk (HDD LED on solid) for seven hours straight.

--

For the past couple of years I've used The Great Suspender to help me try to manage open tabs. I've slowly reached the conclusion that using it has largely been extremely destructive to my sanity and quality of life. The above scenarios are happening because of TGS.

This is because TGS allows me to open a truly stupendous number of tabs - about 800-1200 (yup!) - and because of how Chrome's process model works, all these tabs get bound to one renderer process, so they all only need the overhead of the one process instead of like say 30 host processes, and the net total memory usage is only around ~1.5-2GB or so.

Sounds impressive... until you learn that this ~2GB blob of uselessness cannot be swapped to disk - in the sense that Chrome (for whatever inane reason...) needs to constantly chat with the process over IPC, which works by twiddling bits in the process' shared memory allocation, and then the process does even more twiddling as a result of the IPC.

From this point, either two things happen.

- Let's say I'm doing a large pile of research/work and opening new tabs at a furious rate. TGS suspends tabs after half an hour, so I can pile up a large bunch of unsuspended tabs. At some point the RAM used by the unsuspended tabs will exhaust my RAM and I'll begin swapping to disk.

- The other possibility is that I keep the number of un-suspended tabs fairly low, so 99% of them are suspended. This will allow me to eke ever closer to the 1200 tab mark, at which point the suspended-tab host process will actually be using close to 3-4GB RAM, leaving comparatively little RAM for the OS, the browser, other services, and (oh hey) the unsuspended tabs I have open.

In either of these situations, the exact moment I hit certain watermark, system performance and responsiveness unravels at a remarkable rate, it becomes utterly impossible to even use the computer (as I noted before about high system load), and I have to get the number of tabs down to about 200 before everything rights itself.

At this point my only viable practical option is to use something like Session Buddy to dump all the tabs I have open to disk, and then batch-close all of them, regardless of whatever was open.

:(

To answer your question - honestly, and fairly - no, tabs are NOT a viable read-later mechanism.

--

Obviously I don't have all the time in the world to simply sit on HN all day - or, at the very least, the physical attention span to focus on reading.

Some extremely successful experimental medication has helped me to be able to think several orders of magnitude more clearly than I could ~15 years ago, so in the interests of being as relevant as possible to the workplace when I'm finally able to look for work, I'm doing my level best to catch up and absorb as much information as I can while I have the time.

I open HN, scroll through the frontpage, open about 30 more tabs, and... oops, now I have 30 things to read. They're genuinely interesting! I carefully evaluate each headline as I'm middle-clicking to filter out what I don't think I'll benefit from reading (in the long-term).

I don't want to close unread tabs. In a lot of cases what I find on here has helped me connect dots in incredibly helpful/relevant ways, clear up misconceptions I've had for years, or shown me how to articulate something I've been tripping over for longer than I can remember.

So, it's not really a case of prioritization: I'm trying to information-download as much as I can. In the interests of viability I'm only clicking on things that I am genuinely interested in.

Over 10 years ago I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism (I'd say mid-to-high-functioning myself), and this meant my worldview was very narrow/shallow - in the sense that "only X, Y and Z are interesting", and everything else was evaluated within those scopes, for better or (often) worse. My brain's been freed from that bondage - I can now evaluate things on their own terms - so as far as absorbing information goes, my interests are now [able to be!] "basically everything"!

But this presents a great problem, because I'm still working on my ADD, so I physically can't sit still for long enough to actually read the articles.

Perhaps you see the dilemma: a "read later" list would just be another interpretation of a "18,932" over an email icon. I actually have approximately 20k bookmarks, so this is literally the case.

--

I'm not sure why I wrote all of this. The bit about TGS was easily a rant. I think the last section is perhaps a plea for help. I've had "rewrite all the extensions you use into a single helper tool that integrates everything together" on my todo list for about two years, but I still haven't started it because I've absolutely no idea where to start. Perhaps someone will read this and have some objectivity on the above that I most definitely don't, in which case I would highly appreciate your advice.