Why do browsers sometimes drain a lot of RAM until rebooted?
In: 5662
All sorts of comments responding that it’s good when it happens, it’s only benign stuff, etc. etc. I’ll trust my own eyes, thanks. Memory usage, by any metric you choose, keeps rising. After waiting a day, checking, restarting and reloading the exact same tabs (with no active JS, btw), it’s much lower. What a mystery!
The reason is simple: bad programming.
Unused RAM is just that, unused RAM. Browsers should be happy to get 512MB, especially when they only display static text and images, but we live in the age of webshit. Both OS and browser memory management is atrocious, even when talking about Linux and Firefox, and shouldn’t be trusted to help rather than hinder performance. Leave my resources alone. Stop speculating about what I will do. I’m not a phoneposter.
Developers with 64GB machines should learn to test their programs under serious stress. Give them a shock collar that activates if the system ever starts swapping. If an UI state update ever takes more than 20ms, immediately rm -rf. Force them to run their browser in a VM inside another VM. There’s no way in which modern browsers are acceptable – if my resources should support running 500 copies of IE6 in parallel, why can they barely run an allegedly better browser 1 time?
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