
The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs - p3drosola
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg
======
hga
What I do, when Chrome, or rather, my abuse of it (14 windows, 735 tabs at the
moment, Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit on a 32 GiB system) becomes onerous is to go to
the task manager and kill groups of tabs taking up "too much" memory, and very
occasionally, too much CPU.

(I get away with that abuse, which it a _bit_ higher right now because I'm in
the process of buying a house, by killing _all_ tabs after launching, and only
enabling the ones I want, one by one, using the essential to me Session
Buddy.)

~~~
insulanian
I'm genuinely interested in the reasons people maintain so many tabs open.
What type of workflow you have when you end up with so much stuff open?

How do you get back to some of those tabs? Wouldn't it be easier to just
google it again when you need it instead of having it lingering around and
wasting your HW resources?

~~~
scholia
They accumulate. Every day there are two or three pages you intend to read
later, so you leave them open. A month later, you have an extra 100 tabs
loaded. After six months, you have 600. There are also clusters of tabs
associated with some research you were doing but didn't quite finish.

Then the problem is it would take a couple of days to go through all the
waiting tabs and shut them down, and you don't have a couple of days to spare.

Eventually you just save them all out as a session and start again, and hope
you will learn from your mistakes ;-)

I've switched from FF/Chrome to FF/Vivaldi because it has much better ways to
handle tabs and bookmarks than Chrome does. Vivaldi does tab stacking, for
example.

~~~
nightcracker
Maybe a 'read later' extension could help you? Something longer-term than a
tab, but shorter-term than a bookmark.

~~~
burfog
That would imply taking a positive action to do something about the tab. I
want to just ignore the tab until I need it again. I don't want to treat the
tab specially.

My real desk is messy. I mostly know where stuff is buried because I put it
there and nobody messes with my desk. I clean it about once a year, usually
when a big project is fully done forever. I want the same functionality from
my browser.

------
Sarkie
[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/09/tab-
discar...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/09/tab-
discarding?hl=en)

~~~
afsina
Also, [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1thLjq-
PYoKWaM_ODDZjojr9V...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1thLjq-
PYoKWaM_ODDZjojr9VRG6uGnxeL86EaSzYL5k/edit)

~~~
afsina
AFAIK this is part of the TRIM project in Blink, They have some memory related
goals listed here:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17wW-
YosF8tlEwn45eZ4d...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17wW-
YosF8tlEwn45eZ4delXWPDfWG70vmG-Gnc-63ro/edit?pref=2&pli=1#gid=1135956485)

~~~
Sarkie
Brilliant, thanks for these links!

------
aavotins
It's just incredible. Webpages are now filled with such bloat, that there are
third party tools popping up to help users combat other third party developer
solutions eating up resources on their systems.

------
maxschumacher91
A tool that has served me well in freeing up memory (both in RAM and in my
head) is one-tab:

[https://www.one-tab.com/](https://www.one-tab.com/)

Afaik, current versions of Chrome already implement the functionality of the
great suspender natively.

~~~
Graziano_M
I am a big fan on one tab. It's replace my 'toread' and 'pocket' completely.

------
forgotpwtomain
Every single new chrome release memory consumption just gets worse. Most
recently a single window with 1 gmail tab takes ~500mb (If I recall correctly
you could actually run windows XP on 256).

I'm seriously considering rolling my browsers back to ~2012 and never
upgrading again.

~~~
aug-riedinger
Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Gmail has an internal behavior that adapts its memory usage on available
memory. It may fail in some specific situation (short and wide memory leak),
but as a whole the idea is to __use __RAM as much as possible to make gmail
faster.

And yes, gmail lacks of a "low memory consumption" button for those situation
where automatic memory usage detection fails.

There is video of google explaining this voluntary behavior but I can't find
it unfortunately.

~~~
forgotpwtomain
> Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

This is just ignorant cliche.

> Gmail has an internal behavior that adapts its memory usage on available
> memory. It may fail in some specific situation (short and wide memory leak),
> but as a whole the idea is to use RAM as much as possible to make gmail
> faster.

This has nothing to do with Gmail, this is entirely to do with chromium. When
my X-Server starts to freeze because 8 tabs taking up 2GB of memory means the
OS is intensely swapping to and from disk; I'll take my unused RAM, thanks.

------
stan_rogers
Turned that off almost immediately. Sounds good in theory, but if a suspended
page has a heartbeat of any sort, it has to reload when you return to it. If
that page is an infinite scroller, or if you've hit the "load more" button a
couple of times, well, so much for starting up again where you left off.

~~~
nfriedly
Mobile browsers already suspended most background stuff, and it occasionally
does cause issues like that, but usually it just works.

I learned this out a few years ago when trying to figure out why my metrics
sometimes reported mobile visitors with load times of hours or even days...
Turns out that they opened the site and then switched tabs/apps before it
finished loading. Everything except that metric worked fine. I added a
heartbeat just to detect that, and it worked without introducing any extra
reloads.

~~~
takno
This always drives me mad. It's particularly bad if I'm trying to read content
sites on a train or somewhere with patchy reception - open half a dozen tabs
to give me something to read while I'm disconnected, and then switch to them
only to see the content disappear before my eyes. I'd nominate it as literally
the worst thing about mobile browsing

------
blazespin
Just curious - how are you sure that the addon doesn't have some backchannel
that it's using to send your website info to? Like, let's say you go on a
banking website?

------
leni536
Idea: What if there was an OS interface to mark memory regions as "throwaway"?
Throwaway in the sense that it's less costly to recalculate than to recall it
from swap. So the OS would throw such memory regions instead of swapping out
and signal the process about it to recalculate it if needed.

I don't usually bump into heavy swap usage except when I wake my laptop from
hibernate. I tend to close browsers before hibernating because it's faster to
just resume the last session from a cold start then load from swap.

~~~
amelius
> Throwaway in the sense that it's less costly to recalculate than to recall
> it from swap.

Network is slower than disk (is slower than memory). So if "recalculate" means
getting it from the internet, then probably getting it from disk is faster in
most cases.

~~~
daurnimator
_local_ network is faster than disk.

The internet is rarely faster than disk unless you're in a major data centre.

And then... this is assuming you're referring to spinning rust. local disks in
the form of SSDs will be faster again.

------
antonycourtney
Another useful tab manager extension for Chrome is Tabli
([http://www.gettabli.com](http://www.gettabli.com)), which I created and
submitted as a "Show HN" last October
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10464603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10464603)).
Helps you quickly find tabs you already have open and lets you save and
restore windows (collections of tabs) with meaningful names to keep things
organized. 100% Free Software (sources on github), respects privacy, and has
keyboard shortcuts for efficiency.

~~~
tmikaeld
I tried using that, but i keep getting this issue on OS X:
[https://i.imgur.com/PeZluRL.png](https://i.imgur.com/PeZluRL.png)

This is not specific to Tabli though, it's every time there is an extension
popup with content.

Maybe it's something that can be fixed? Also, the open animation is painfully
slow.

~~~
antonycourtney
Thanks for the bug report. I have seen that happen intermittently but have
never managed to find a reliable repro. There's a long-standing open issue on
github for it:
[https://github.com/antonycourtney/tabli/issues/45](https://github.com/antonycourtney/tabli/issues/45)

I have new release of Tabli pending that will address a number of performance
issues, so may resolve this for you. If you DM me I can let you know when it's
available.

------
illuminea
I prefer to "snooze" tabs using the Tab Snooze Chrome Extension. That way they
reappear when I can hopefully give them attention. I can tell the extension to
put tabs to sleep until this evening, tomorrow, this weekend, next week (my
fave), next month, someday (I haven't tried that one, too scary), or a
specific date. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-
snooze/pdiebia...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-
snooze/pdiebiamhaleloakpcgmpnenggpjbcbm?hl=en)

------
andmarios
Google should acquihire the team and embed it in Chrome.

I use tabs as a task list (around 30-50 at a time) and without this tool I
wouldn't be on my laptop, I would need a desktop with at least 64GB of RAM...

~~~
basch
it's already built into chrome, my canary has been doing it for a while,
pretty sure beta and dev do it now too.

~~~
andmarios
It hasn't arrived at beta yet but thanks for the heads up!

------
mdeeks
The best use of this is for saving battery life. Chrome will absolutely
destroy your battery. You can configure it to auto-suspend tabs after X
minutes of inactivity only when you are on battery. (Alternatively you can
switch to Safari to save battery life.)

Like others have said, The Great Suspender will often break web pages and
force them to completely reload. This ruins infinite scroller pages too. So
thats the trade off.

------
jaksmit
The Great Suspender has been around for a long time; I posted it to Product
Hunt ~2 years ago: [https://www.producthunt.com/tech/the-great-
suspender](https://www.producthunt.com/tech/the-great-suspender)

it's pretty good. I don't really use the auto mode much, but I use it to
manually kill tabs (can be faster than killing via the task manager)

------
squas
The Great Suspender allows me to keep many tabs (currently 214) open without
CPU meltdown.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-
suspende...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-
suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon)

------
amelius
What happens when a tab is doing background work, such as uploading a file, or
performing a calculation, or just keeping track of timer events? (Will those
timer events appear to happen all at once when the task is resumed?)

~~~
gcatalfamo
No, there might be some service disruption with ongoing task. However, you
wouldn't use it on a working tab like that, but on those residing for "I might
need this later" and hogging memory.

------
audi100quattro
Maybe Google could come up with a zero-cost tab and have users pick it (more
than 10 tabs?) when they don't care about latency and pre-loading of webpages
so much.

------
klue07
Any good alternatives recommended for Firefox?

~~~
skrowl
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-
plus/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-plus/) does the
same thing (actually a little better in the implementation) on Firefox. Once
you install, go into config for it and set how long a tab may be idle before
it auto-unloads. Unloaded tabs are shown slightly dimmed in the tab bar. You
can also right click tabs (such as gmail / youtube / etc) and force them to
always stay loaded, so your email / music streaming / etc aren't impacted.

Combo it with [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-
pa...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-panorama/)
that lets you organize your tabs into groups and you can have hundreds of well
organized tabs without using much memory at all.

~~~
kasabali
> Combo it with [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-
> pa...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa..). that
> lets you organize your tabs into groups and you can have hundreds of well
> organized tabs without using much memory at all.

Be careful with that because every tab has a constant memory consumption even
when not loaded, so it will actually have a noticeable memory consumption when
you have several hundreds of tabs. I learned it the hard way.

------
dharma1
great chrome addon, been using it for a year or two.

I've got around 40-50 tabs open usually, and "spring clean" all but the active
one a couple of times a day (right click a tab, close other tabs). Chrome used
to be a complete memory hog until this addon.

------
fullofstack
Closing your tabs and using the browser's history achieves the same thing.

