the performance improvement with 28.1 has been insane

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Public Enema

the performance improvement with 28.1 has been insane

Unread post by Public Enema » 2018-10-15, 18:11

I'm a compulsive tab hoarder, and I do mean it. Before 28.1, Pale Moon could handle only a paltry 3200-3300 tabs in a session -- with less than 1% loaded, natch. Past a limit within that span, the browser would fail to render some things, like windows backgrounds (altho the text would still appear), scroll bars wouldn't refresh their position etc. and unless I promptly culled several tabs, PM would crash silently. Just plain end the process. I figured, "oh well, I am pushing it, over 3200 tabs is already more than anyone could have expected". So I would save these sessions on Session Manager or All Tabs Helper, and begin a new one... which eventually would go past 3200. Rinse and repeat. I just found it odd how the number of tabs alone could cause a crash, even when other resources, including RAM, were still far from maxed out.

Well version 28.1 has removed that limit completely, it seems. I'm at 8143 tabs and counting. Now I'm noticing a small performance hit at times, as it seems that simply unloading tabs and minimizing memory usage isn't enough to completely free up all resources they used. Once I hit some unknown limit of resource usage and start having short but constant freeze-ups, unloading all tabs and minimizing memory usage doesn't get rid of it. But again, I can't complain. So long as I don't keep too many tabs loaded at a time, I can stay away from that limit seemingly indeterminedly. All Tabs Helper is also struggling -- clicking the toolbar button takes too long because of all the tabs, so the browser goes through one of those short freezes, which "instacloses" the menu that should have appeared. But of course, this isn't a problem with PM itself.

Thanks a lot, devs. Whatever telemetry thingamabobs you removed in 28.1, I hope there are more yet to be removed!

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Re: the performance improvement with 28.1 has been insane

Unread post by therube » 2018-10-15, 18:27

What OS?
How much RAM are you using?

Using any extensions specifically in relation to the number of tabs you use?

Any particular "types" of sites you visit in these tabs?
(As in mostly text based, media, ... ?)


(I'm thinking my tab limit has been ~1000 tabs.)
Last edited by therube on 2018-10-15, 18:35, edited 1 time in total.

Public Enema

Re: the performance improvement with 28.1 has been insane

Unread post by Public Enema » 2018-10-15, 23:41

Windows 7, 8GB RAM. It's worth noting that I have no other "large" software running, just music players, text editors and such. So I can let PM get to almost 7GB before I get RAM-related slowdowns. But that's only if I slip up and leave too many tabs loaded. Keeping the number of loaded tabs steady works to keep RAM much lower.

I'm using All Tabs Helper, Tab Groups Helper and Lull The Tabs to help me wrangle them, but other than that, I'm not using anything specific to tabs.

As to the types of sites I use, good question, because it reminded me of an important factor. I visit all sorts of sites, and it turns out images nowadays use relatively little RAM, so image-heavy sites aren't an issue. The biggest processor- and RAM-gobbler by far are Javascript. You know how it is these days, sites are stuffed full of JS crap of all kinds, webdevs seem to pay no regard whatsoever to how much their sites will hog a visitor's resources. I use uMatrix and uBlock, and they help out immensely, not just in getting rid of ads and tracking, but also using up much fewer resources. Usually, a site will have one or two scripts that make the site nicer, altho a few require me to turn uMatrix or uBlock off in order to use a specific feature or even read the site at all. Other than those, sites might have a million more scripts that add nothing of importance, some that not only slow the browser down, like pointless cosmetics, but actually harm the user, crap like trackers, targeted ads, adblockerblockers and such. Having them filtered out saves up an absurd amount of RAM.

Almost inevitably, the more mainstream a site is, the more JS gunk it has. FB is a particularly bad offender, with no less than 205 scripts in a single damn profile page, using up a preposterous 104MB RAM (a Google search with the add-ons turned on uses 10-15MB, news sites can be only 10MB). And that's without me using the page's JS functions, which would increase that amount even more. Blocking all those scripts breaks the site, and finding out which of them are the bare minimum necessary would be a pain.

For the record, an unloaded tab uses up 0.16MB.
Last edited by Public Enema on 2018-10-15, 23:43, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: the performance improvement with 28.1 has been insane

Unread post by Moonchild » 2018-10-16, 20:43

Cool to see your experiment is going well but please be aware that that amount of tabs is way outside of design scope, and you may hit design limits that could cause data loss, either by the periodic saving of the session to disk, or the internal administration keeping track of tab metadata.
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Re: the performance improvement with 28.1 has been insane

Unread post by back2themoon » 2018-10-17, 17:08

"A paltry 3200-3300 tabs", "I'm at 8143 tabs and counting". I mean, seriously?

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Re: the performance improvement with 28.1 has been insane

Unread post by rabnbeinn » 2018-10-17, 18:02

More power to you guys for having all these tabs open :clap: , but for the life of me I can not figure out why you would need/want 3000 tabs let alone 8000 :wtf:

Just curious...

Public Enema

Re: the performance improvement with 28.1 has been insane

Unread post by Public Enema » 2018-10-30, 01:52

Moonchild wrote:Cool to see your experiment is going well but please be aware that that amount of tabs is way outside of design scope, and you may hit design limits that could cause data loss, either by the periodic saving of the session to disk, or the internal administration keeping track of tab metadata.
Thanks for the warning. So far, using both Session Manager and Tab Groups Manager has kept me safe.
back2themoon wrote:"A paltry 3200-3300 tabs", "I'm at 8143 tabs and counting". I mean, seriously?
I'm just hardcore like that. :ugeek:
rabnbeinn wrote:More power to you guys for having all these tabs open :clap: , but for the life of me I can not figure out why you would need/want 3000 tabs let alone 8000 :wtf:

Just curious...
I have the bad habit of clicking every link I find interesting and it's more than I can read at the moment, so I keep them for later. If I bookmarked them, I'd forget they exist at all, so I keep unloaded tabs instead, so that I can scroll around and find something interesting. Kinda like a grab bag.

fillerup

Re: the performance improvement with 28.1 has been insane

Unread post by fillerup » 2018-10-30, 02:05

it can take me days to read thru 80-90 tabs, might take you years to clean house..

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Re: the performance improvement with 28.1 has been insane

Unread post by Goodydino » 2018-11-05, 20:13

Have you people never heard of bookmarks? It is a low-loading way of saving pages, and it takes very little time to load a bookmarked page. It is very easy to back them up as well.

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Re: the performance improvement with 28.1 has been insane

Unread post by satrow » 2018-11-05, 20:19

Goodydino wrote:Have you people never heard of bookmarks? It is a low-loading way of saving pages, and it takes very little time to load a bookmarked page. It is very easy to back them up as well.
Also a useful way of stress testing - try opening 700+ at the same time :thumbup:

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Re: the performance improvement with 28.1 has been insane

Unread post by Goodydino » 2018-11-06, 19:33

So what? You cannot read 700 pages at a time.

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Re: the performance improvement with 28.1 has been insane

Unread post by satrow » 2018-11-07, 02:17

For me, it's not about 'at a time' or normal, short session usage, it's about ongoing research and having tools that are stable enough to retain a spiders web of data, my 'normal' sessions start with 30+ pinned tabs plus whatever remains from the previous session (my sessions 'end' for a variety of reasons, often because I need to test a new browser beta or unstable).

Downloading a 'new' browser might take seconds, or hours: due to external infrastructure reasons my average FTTC speeds over the last 3 months (which is greatly improved from the previous 3, eg. no multi-day outages) are 7.4 Mbps down, 0.7 Mbps up, frequently dropping to the point of being almost unusable between 19:00 and 02:00 (primarily 500+ meters of aluminium cable further impacted at 'peak times' by ISP backhaul congestion). Pretty unreliable if I were to rely on opening Bookmarks 'live', better for me to keep them loaded/cached for frustration-free research.

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