Comment by philsnow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philsnow | Hacker News Reader

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Firefox is particularly good at having lots of tabs open and not using tons of memory.

    $ ~/dev/mozlz4-tool/target/release/mozlz4-tool \
        "$(find ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/ -name recovery.jsonlz4 | head -1)" | \
        jq -r '[.windows[].tabs | length] | add'
    5524

Activity monitor claims firefox is using 3.1GB of ram.

    Real memory size:      2.43 GB
    Virtual memory size: 408.30 GB
    Shared memory size:  746.5  MB
    Private memory size: 377.3  MB

That said, I wholeheartedly agree that "more RAM less problems". The only case I can think of when it's not strictly better to have more is during hibernation (cf sleep) when the system has to write 128GB of ram to disk.

In my experience firefox is "pretty good" about having lots of tabs and windows open if you don't mind it crashing every week or two.

I've not had a crash on Firefox in like a decade, basically since the Quantum update in like 2016.

Try living like I do. I currently have 1,838 tabs open across 9 different windows. On second thought, maybe don't live like I do...

Why do you need all of these tabs open? How do you find what you need?

I likely don't need all the tabs. Some were opened only because they might be useful or interesting. Others get opened because they cover something I want to dig into further later on, but in this case it's the buildup of multiple crash>restore cycles. Eventually I'll get to each tab and close it or save the URL separately until it's back to 0, but even in that process new tabs/windows get opened so it can take time.

I've got ~5k+ tabs, and I've also seen basically zero crashes in the last decade. I'm on Macos, not very many extensions though one of them is Sidebery (and before that Tree Style Tabs) which seems to slow things down quite a lot.

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