Why do browsers sometimes drain a lot of RAM until rebooted?
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I’m sure you have many explanations, but here’s a related tip: Get an addon that suspends tabs after X minutes. You get to set X. If you leave a browser open and many tabs (Raises hand) you want that quick mark if you want to go back, but you don’t need to have it in memory. When X happens, it kills that, but keeps the tab. When you click on the tab next time, it simply refreshes and brings it back alive again. It’s a go to addon for all my systems.
For Firefox I use Tab Suspender, here are the options available:
It’s not browsers. It’s the poorly written, JavaScript based AD infested websites that do. You can open 100 static HTML only websites and it won’t hurt anything.
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?
Every tab or window your browser has open is (essentially) another copy of the browser program. Each tab then takes more and more memory and resources away from your device. Eventually your PC/Mac/phone slows and bogs down so much while it tries to manage all the resources being used, it becomes unusable.
Let’s use a kitchen for our example. You want to cook some food, so you need to go to the fridge and get the ingredients.
At first, you have 0 ingredients, so you call in an order from Walmart delivery. It gets there and you put it in the fridge. You decide you want to keep that recipe in mind, but you decide to start another recipe. Well, you have 0 ingredients for the second recipe, so you place another order.
This continues until your fridge is too full. You’re now spending more time trying to keep things in the fridge and organized than looking at recipes.
Then, you decide to shut off the fridge. All the food goes bad, you throw out all the food, and when you begin again with an empty fridge when you turn it on again.
Now, you may have thrown away all the Rotten food, but you didn’t wipe the fridge clean. You still have crumbs and mold inside the fridge. You start adding more food to your fridge, but there were some crumbs left over so you don’t quite have as much room to put the fresh stuff in. You keep doing this over and over and eventually you will have no room for even fresh food.
The fridge is your computers memory. A browser tab is your recipe book. The store is the server the site is hosted on. The food is the information given to your computers memory. The fresh food is the stuff you can use faster than the crumbs that you have to wipe up and collect. The crumbs are the details stored on your hard drive that take just slightly longer to pull up, but stick around a lot longer.
I hope that helps.
This is why Ive been running 32gb RAM on my gaming PC for over a decade.
Do I *need* that much? Of course not.
Does it let me do hella dumb shit like alt-tabbing to the how-to wiki in the browser while playing the game? You bet your ass it does.
I think it has been already explained pretty well but just wanted to add extensions are also a main source of drain.
Browsers don’t use much RAM in a modern PC, this is a misconception that developed from when computers had only megabytes of RAM.
You might find that it’s the websites you visit consuming all your RAM as they have multimedia from different sources.
Consider using a plugin like the great suspender
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