(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I have a frugal tahr64_6.0.6 in one PC.
I have never, ever experienced that an application has taken all my memory. But Mike Walsh's Vivaldi-portable did it! After a long session wth many sites browsed, and 10-12 open tabs, everything on the PC slowed down, the Vivaldi froze. I tried to open hTop to see what was going on, but the only reaction was i little pop-up window that said: Could not allocate memory. I have 4Gb RAM, and 6Gb swap on that PC! I could not even turn it off, I got the same message, I had to hold the power button for several seconds to power-off. The funny thing is that my Palemoon was also open, and I could move up and down in the open window, but not switch between tabs.
I do not keep the Palemoon or Vivaldi in the save file, I find it better to keep the latest versions in a folder on the harddisk, in the case of PM, I also keep the prefs dir there. I load them when needed. Despite never using bookmarks or history, and setting all such info to last for the session only, Vivaldi keeps growing, the one stored is now 508Mb,( I did not know beforehand) which is the size it had when I started the bad bsession.
Do other users experience the same? I left Mike Walsh a message about this thread.
BTW: The portable Vivaldi is not the latest 3.1 version, but the previous version.

Olaf:-

It's not due to anything I've done, I can assure you!

TBH, part of the problem is that the way Chromium-based browsers run, they just are quite 'RAM-hungry'.....for the simple reason that every single tab runs as its own, self-contained, sandboxed "process". The browser was conceived of as being like this right from day one, apparently. None of the 'clones' are a particularly good choice for people who like to have a lot of tabs open at the same time on, shall we say, 'limited resources'.....which these days includes only 4 GB of RAM (no offense, Olaf; the world's moved on a long way from what was considered low-resource in Puppy's early days). For this scenario, Mozilla-based browsers really are far more suitable.

On the old Compaq tower, any time I ran more than 6 or 7 tabs simultaneously with any of the 'clones', gKrellM showed I was getting very close to using the 3 GB of RAM that I had..! On this new HP Pavilion, I'm now up to 16 GB (might yet go for 32 GB, but that's a little way off ATM), yet I very rarely have more than 5 or 6 tabs open at a time.....that's just the way I browse.

If I know I'm going to want a 'heavy' session, I fire Quantum up, simply because it handles it better. The clones have their "strengths", too, but this isn't one of them. Otherwise, it's Vivaldi.....or Chrome.....or Iron.....or Opera.....or Brave.....or Yandex.....(or ?)

The list goes on. RAM usage "per tab" is the one failing the clones all share, unfortunately.....although they do seem to work a LOT better on modern hardware with ample resources. (And this is why I say I'm not really in keeping with Puppy 'tradition' any longer..!)


Mike.

Thank you, Mike, that was a good explanation. It is new to me, the way these Chrome-based browsers work. Do you know why the browser itself is growing after a sessions?
I shall find the original one that I downloaded, set the prefs, and use a copy of it when needed, and just delete it after each session. That way I keep it small(ish).

Someone here (sorry not to remember who was), suggested to run vivaldi with this parameters: Before that, vivaldi hangs where rather frequent, but much less frequent compared to firefox.
Not sure what was, the symptom: the light of the hard drive became on continuously and the machine nearly unusable.
The patient: An old DualCore with 2 Gb ram (1 Gb occupied by a virtual machine) + 2 Gb swap.

With the above code, very, very rarely happens.

Hope that helps.

Some of the Chromium clones inherit a setting to the effect of 'continue to run background SOMETHING when the browser closes'. A cursory search didn't find it on Vivaldi: but my blood-sugar is low and have to break for lunch.

Interesting, thank you, guys. I'll do some tests with those params, Galbi.

mikeslr wrote:Some of the Chromium clones inherit a setting to the effect of 'continue to run background SOMETHING when the browser closes'. A cursory search didn't find it on Vivaldi: but my blood-sugar is low and have to break for lunch.

it is present in vivaldi.
if you type chrome://settings in the vivaldi urlbar it presents the chromium settings page and background apps can be turned off there.
Also i am not certain which chromium flags have an effect on vivaldi.

Added most of Galbi's code to the vilvaldi-pup script, moved a 267Mb portable 3.1 to /opt, launched it, did nothing, closed it, it is now at 284Mb. Hmm, intriguing!

In vivaldi you can freeze background tabs (to what effect I'm not sure). Right click any tab label and choose "hybernate other tabs".

Thank you, step.

@ Olaf:-

To answer a part of one of your earlier questions:-

tallboy wrote:Do you know why the browser itself is growing after a sessions?

....yeah; I do. It's because the way the clones cache absolutely everything in sight makes a Mozilla browser look "stingy" in comparison! Not only that, but everything is cached in a proprietary format peculiar to these browsers.....plus, it's not so easy to control the cache size in the way that Mozilla will allow you to, either.

You either love 'em, or you hate 'em.....


Mike.

Hate it right now!

TBH, having gone through much the same process myself, I can only agree.

Case in point; the old Compaq tower. 64-bit, dual-core; Wooo! And 3 GB RAM....

Very, very early 64-bit tech, from 15/16 yrs ago. Essentially a pair of P4s strapped together; no hyperthreading, fairly basic instruction ssts. It ran a lot of Pups.....mostly 32-bit, though with limitations.....like don't attempt too much at once!

----------------------------------

When I got this new HP tower back in January, it came with just 4 GB. There were a few things I wanted to add/upgrade, but RAM was first on the agenda. 4GB became 8GB in very short order.....then some weeks back, 8 GB became 16GB. I may even go for 32GB at some point in the future; the board will support it.

I know it's getting well away from Pup's original principle, that of keeping elderly, resource-starved hardware still functional.....but the result of increasing RAM to what some would consider possibly "insane" or "overkill" levels is quite simply this:-

- You can open whatever you like, whenever you like, and not concern yourself as to whether it'll work. It will! And no need to watch the RAM meter.

- The great advantage of doing so is that you can disable "swap" altogether, and Puppy runs totally in this huge quantity of DDR4 memory. As Moose on the Loose has said, when you can do this Pup becomes "spooky fast".

- Plus, of course, most apps (including browsers, without which I don't consider a 'puter to be functional) simply are getting 'heavier' than they used to be....


Mike.