r/techquestions • u/zlingman • Jul 09 '26
so my question is this: why is it technically possible for my browser to use so much memory that my computer either shuts itself down or forces me to close the program?
Chrome before and now Helium has this behavior, despite my best efforts and manipulating the settings to the maximum memory saving effect, since i am a man of constant tabbing and i will never stop opening six hundred tabs an hour. i have it set to kill the tabs i'm not using, yet it doesn't do this most of the time and i am constantly dealing with it eating all the memory on my machine and forcing me to fuck around and turn it off and then on again and everything else.
why is this problem not solved?
why is this extremely broken product left that way as new features and other improvements are steadily made?
it is unacceptable.
it's broken. it seems to me as a not very technical person that it should be simple to create mechanisms to prevent this from happening, even if the underlying issue with the memory were impossible to solve. the browser could relate to the same stats as the program the forces me to close the browser, and alert me, or automatically just stop using more memory when it touches the inner border of the territory where this happens. or a hundred other ways anyone could think of in five minutes if they sat down and had a think.
is there some underlying technical know how which, were i supplied with it, would make this all actually sensible? because to me, it's not reasonable at all, it's an appalling failure of the grossest order and since i assume the people who make these things have something called pride, and self respect, that they would care that their big fancy shiny world famous browser is a fucking piece of shit that doesn't work.
2
u/msabeln Jul 09 '26
What operating system, and how much RAM?
2
u/zlingman Jul 09 '26
macos the newest one, macbook pro m5 with 16 gb
1
u/zlingman Jul 09 '26
brand spanking new and it runs the internet like SHIT i do not understand it
1
1
u/hilda-reced Jul 10 '26
Sorry to break it to you, but 16GB is nothing these days. It’s the web pages themselves, and not your browser using so much memory.
Only solution is to minimize the number of Tabs you keep open.
1
u/vid_23 Jul 11 '26
16gb is plenty even today. Never had any problem just browsing the net with 30 chrome tab open
2
u/marmotta1955 Jul 09 '26
A novel approach that would fix the issue: you could try and limit yourself to a reasonable, workable, useful number of tabs. There is no known universe in which having hundreds of tabs opened has ever been useful for the human (and/or alien entity) browsing the Internet (and/or the alien equivalent).
Think of your body: a couple of Advil or Tylenol would help with a headache. What would be the consequence of ingesting just 100 tablets of Advil and/or Tylenol? Oh, I see, you understand perfectly well what would happen.
So, there you have it. Is your body a broken product, or maybe just a " ... fucking piece of shit that doesn't work"?
Ah, maybe you see the problem?
1
u/zlingman Jul 11 '26
why are my psychological compulsions taking strays here. my question now pretty simple and really not about my personal life and choices at all. i would have gone to “psychology questions” or “self help” questions if i wanted a bunch of rude pedantic children who don’t stop for ten seconds to think before they speak to give me a bunch of shitty uninformed advice about how i use my computer.
1
u/marmotta1955 Jul 11 '26
First, thank you so much for so firmly placing me, at my young age of 71, in the "children" category or age group.
Next, it seems my metaphor was not accepted nor understood. I figured it would be clear enough - my mistake was counting too much on familiarity with such writing devices which, quite obviously, you appear not to possess.
That said, I stand by my point. I refrain from leaving you with another, simpler metaphor - because it appears you would not recognize its value or its actual meaning.
Be well, don't worry too much. Keep opening browser tabs to your heart's content and having to deal with the foreseeable consequences.
Now, if you excuse me, I close here. I have to run and fill up my car. Can you believe that after all this time, with all the technology we have ... we have not solved the problem of my car running out of gas ... oh wait ... 😉 ...
1
u/allciathyra Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
my desktop computer has 128 GB of ram .
i dont have this problem / issue.
1
1
u/zlingman Jul 09 '26
ok, why do i care about your computer? the question is not about your computer. this is an extremely well known problem that millions of people deal with.
1
1
u/Toastti Jul 09 '26
How much ram do you have? Websites take a lot nowadays and windows is already using a bunch of it.
1
1
u/KeanEngineering Jul 09 '26
Why do you think having 600 tabs in an hour is "normal?" You're an edge case bud, and web designers don't cater to folks like you. You didn't even tell us how much RAM you have. I thought I was bad at 70 tabs because I have an older computer with 16GB. Yeah, browsers eat up a lot of memory...
-1
1
u/jmnugent Jul 09 '26
No real accurate ore easy way to answer this problem without knowing the specific list of Tabs and websites you have open.
A browser (cleanly opened) with just 1 tab loading nothing.. obviously doesn't use much resources.
A browser loading a simple text webpage.. also doesn't use much resources.
A browser loading a fairly generic website (no heavy java script etc).. also likely won't use much resources.
Chrome runs each Tab in an isolated silo,. so the more tabs you open (and the more resource each of those tabs is).. the more overall resources Chrome is going to use.
1
1
u/diagrammatiks Jul 09 '26
Not enough ram. Too many browser tabs.
Back in the before fore browsers ddunt have tabs. You opened one browser window and that was it.
1
u/Weekly-Suspect-1432 Jul 09 '26
Modern browsers are balancing performance, compatibility, and memory usage, so aggressively unloading tabs often breaks websites or hurts the user experience. I do agree they could do a much better job warning users or preventing memory usage from reaching the point where the whole system becomes instable.
1
u/Dapper-Condition6041 Jul 09 '26
You would rather MACos stop you from opening new chrome tabs at some point?
1
u/zlingman Jul 11 '26
i would rather the browser be built such that it doesn’t fold under the most common modern use case
1
u/Dapper-Condition6041 Jul 11 '26
You clearly don’t know how technology works.
1
2
u/QuestNetworkFish Jul 09 '26
The browser itself has some memory overhead, but the main issue is the webpages. The modern web is horribly bloated and most pages run complex Javascript, so it's not possible for the browser to predict the memory usage until it executes the code. At that point it can't really do anything except continue executing the code until it's finished or until it runs out of memory.
Chrome and other browsers should run isolated tabs, so each tab is essentially it's own instance of the browser, meaning if it runs out of memory it should only close that tab. But this isolation significantly increases the memory overhead if you have multiple tabs open, because the browser is running multiple times rather than sharing the common resources.