Implement RAM limits

Haarolean

I've observed that many tabs just being kept in the background for quite some time may eat a hug amount of RAM. Constantly monitoring such doesn't seem optimal, would be nice to implement a mechanism to limit RAM per tab or, perhaps, a more intelligent approach. One might also consider freezing tabs if being left inactive for a long pariod of time, I believe such a concept exists in Chrome.

N/A

Vlad

Haarolean Low power mode is probably what you need.

Haarolean

stuff like twitter eats up to 500mb+ pretty often

eirk

low power mode can auto suspend tabs after a 5 minutes.

Haarolean

eirk there might be some other things which will happen with a low power mode which we don't want

whitemamba

Haarolean The other option currently would be to manually suspend tabs

eirk

Haarolean no, https://help.kagi.com/orion/features/low-power-mode.html
low power mode shouldnt do anything else

Haarolean

Vlad it’s weird ux-wise. Why do I have to use a low power mode as an OOM killer? Makes no sense.

Vlad

Curious what other browsers do in this situation? Do they just automatically kill/suspend tabs?

Haarolean

Vlad chrome suspends tabs in newer versions to save the RAM and yes, tabs might crash as well.

Haarolean

@Vlad also using low power mode makes all the other tabs suspended. That's not what this is about, we need to kill hungry tabs rather than suspending them all. Can we reopen this?

Vlad

Haarolean Can you describe exactly what the algorithm for this should look like?

Haarolean

Vlad

I guess it would be wise to have a hard limit of RAM per tab. Choosing a proper value might be hard, so allowing the user to adjust it in the settings sounds wise. IIRC chrome
AFAIK chrome has a feature (it might be enabled by default in recent versions) to suspend tabs automatically if unused to save the resources. The vital thing here is to pause JS execution for the suspended tabs. I often see some tabs consuming more and more RAM in Orion despite me not even opening the corresponding tabs.
Orion's "suspension" on the other hand does a page reload upon reopening the tab, which is not ideal, considering scroll position and other things.