I got 32 just so I could hoard more browser tabs. I have a more minimal setup on my laptop that goes with me places and any tabs I anticipate not needing for a couple weeks or more go to the desktop with more ram.
In a similar fashion I got my sons old netbook. It has 32GB flash as storage medium. 27GB were in use by Windows, Office, and Firefox. User file size was neglectable. Then it ran into problems because it wanted to download an 8GB update.
Now it runs Kubuntu, which uses about 4GB with LibreOffice and a load of other things.
"Free" memory is actually usually used for cache. So instead of waiting to get data from the disk, the system can just read it directly from RAM after the first access. The more RAM you have, the more free space you'll have to use for cache. My machine often has over 20GB of RAM used as cache. You can see this with free -m. IIRC both Gnome and KDE's system managers also show that now.
For me it's a pattern of "Ctrl+t" to open a new tab and then I search "my interesting query". After that, I use "shift+tab" or "Ctrl+shift+tab" to navigate between tabs. Rinse and repeat until I get tired.
I don't like searching in my current tab because I don't want to lose the info I have.
Oh, here's the 4 pages of documentation of items and crafting recipes of this nodded game I'm playing that are open at all times.
Then there's the tsb with the video series I'm watching, the tab with the dropout home, other two tabs for two series I'd like to watch, about 3 different tabs that I just closed down that were opened yesterday to search some ffxiv market item prices for a friend, WhatsApp web, some Path of exile trade live tabs in case an item I've been searching for a month shows up on trade in a reasonable price to pick up the game again, the medianxl ladder to check for gear on too players, 2-3 tabs for players on the ladder to check their gears as a rough template,...
I'd say at any given time it's a minimum of 10, and I'm not being held responsible of my work browser tabs. That's more like, 4 github repos because they ask me about stuff and I forget to close them, hue, the spark docs on like 5 tabs, 3 google searches, several excels with project tracking stuff, and maybe an extra 10 to 20 tabs open depending of what I'm searching or have been asked about in the last 2 days.
"Simple Tab Groups" extension for Firefox desktop allowed me to evolve from constantly rearranging/bookmarking ~20 shrinking tabs in a window and dropping projects; to hoarding 30-40 tabs worth of research material and unfinished project ideas in rotating groups
I ran with 8gb ram for 7 years because zram would shove my swap into what little ram I had available and it actually worked well enough that I didn't feel like upgrading until this year lol.
That that to the 3000 browser tabs I have open, two instances of VS code, the multithreaded python app I’m running and developing, the several-gigabytes large dataset that’s active in memory.
Transcoding an HDR blueray to h265 filled it up pretty quick and I'm about to start dabbling with game development/3d modeling.
I've also filled it up pretty quick learning how fast various data structures are in which situations. You don't really see a difference in speed until you get into the billions of items at least for python.
For automations and small apps it's fast enough. It's a fair traidoff for the fast turnaround time.
I'm thinking of learning go or c though because i don't care much for the runtime errors. It's no fun using an application for a while just for a typo in a rarely used function to tank the entire app.
I just took a Core i5, 6 GB RAM laptop from 2011 and reinstalled Linux Mint and put in a 1 TB SSD. The difference between that and Ubuntu 23.10 and a 750 GB 5400 RPM drive was like night and day.
horrible take IMO. firefox is using 12GB for me right now, but you have no idea how many or what kind of tabs either of us have, which makes all the difference to the point your comment has no value whatsoever.
How come it has no value? I used to run Chrome but now I run Firefox. My browsing habits have not changed yet the memory consumption has greatly improved. It may not have any value to you but it certainly was a valuable experience for me and I made the comment hoping that it might find someone who is in the same situation as I was. I've got nothing to prove and nothing to gain. Anyone may run their own experiment.
but you have no idea how many or what kind of tabs either of us have,
Can't speak for you but I certainly do have an idea of how many and what kind of tabs I have and how many and what kind of tabs I used to have in Chrome.
would certainly love to see your side by side comparison of a large difference in memory usage between the two using the same tabs and no extensions with up to date versions.
I’m not the person you responded to, but I can say that it’s a perfectly fine take. My personal experience and the commonly voiced opinions about both browsers supports this take.
Unless you’re using 5 tabs max at a time, my personal experience is that Firefox is more than an order of magnitude more memory efficient than Chrome when dealing with long-lived sessions with the same number of tabs (dozens up to thousands).
I keep hundreds of tabs open in Firefox on my personal machine (with 16 GB of RAM) and it’s almost never consuming the most memory on my system.
Policy prohibits me running Firefox on my work computer, so I have to use Chrome. Even with much more memory (both on 32 GB and 64 GB machines) and far fewer tabs (20-30 at most vs 200-300), Chrome often ends up taking up far too much memory + having a substantial performance drop, and I have to to through and prune the tabs I don’t need right now, bookmark things that can be done later, etc..
In my experience of switching from Chrome to Firefox in the last year thanks to Lemmy, I have to say that using FF for work comes with all sorts of performance issues.
Then again, my specific use case includes having ~10 windows open at ~20 tabs each, sometimes even more. Definitely pushing the limits of the browser lol
Yeah, I'm with you there, but I'm also a believer in having a little more ram than you need. After a couple of decades of feeling that occasional bottleneck it seems like a relatively cheap prevention measure.
