When I moved to the SDMB tab to post this, the page reloaded. This is a fairly new phenomenon but it seems to happen a lot. I’m not sure why. There didn’t seem to be significant problems before this started happening. Obviously, this is caused by some recent update. (Ubuntu/Firefox)
So is this something under my control? That is, can I turn it off? I couldn’t find anything in the Preferences.
Is that the ‘scrolling down the page and suddenly there’s no more posts and then the page partially reloads and it jumped back X number of posts and the back marker disappeared’ thingy I’m experiencing?
No. I’m talking about switching from one tab to another. And it does it on all webpages. This isn’t something particular to Discourse.
Ahh. Good thing I didn’t report this for a forum change then!
When you switched tabs was the tab you switched to blank and it reloaded or loaded and then it reloaded?
It might be that thingy that browsers are doing these days to save memory by ‘unloading’ pages that aren’t the active tab.
The former.
That’s almost certainly it. Do browsers actually need to save memory?
Yup,
{…} All web browsers suffer from memory leak issues, including Firefox and Chrome. {…}
Because of a wireless card problem in my good laptop I’m stuck with this thing that constantly popped up system low memory warnings. Had to install Opera just to get something that would actually run and even Opera gives me "no memory, reload the page’ warnings.
OK, that makes sense. I can’t remember getting a memory low warning, even before this behavior started. The sign that I need to reboot is that the connection to the LAN has dropped. That happens every few days. I think that time has gotten longer since this memory saving behavior started. Hard to say, because I don’t log these things.
How much RAM does your machine have? With enough RAM, this reloading behavior shouldn’t be an issue unless you have umpteen open tabs with resource eating content.
Have no idea of the RAM. I don’t have huge numbers of tabs. Typically two windows with 4 to 6 tabs each. Sometimes one may get more than 6, but not a lot more. I’ll try to note how many are open the next time this happens.
As far as resource-eating content, probably the biggest one that I frequently use is Google Maps/Streetview. But I usually do not to leave it in Streetview when I’m not using that tab.
Nah, Google Maps shouldn’t be a crucial resource hog, I was thinking more of many tabs of sites with many images and video links, like news sites. But it would be crucial to figure out your RAM size. I could explain how to get that in Windows, but I only have fleeting knowledge in Linux and none in Ubuntu, but there must be some easy way to determine it.
ETA: maybe look here:
output of “free -b”:
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3989909504 2469658624 245215232 751820800 1275035648 521428992
Swap: 2147479552 1259581440 887898112Almost 4 GB of RAM
Well, now we seem to have the culprit. 4 GB of RAM for a contemporary computer operated with regular browsing customs is very, very low. I can easily see how two browser windows with six tabs each can stress the memory.
Thanks. I guess an upgrade is in order then.
Have you not been able to get a small USB wireless dongle to help with your main laptop’s issues?
Also, check out tab suspension and tab discard extensions. They can give you more control on unloading tabs from RAM, including having things based on a timer. Also, be sure to use the 32-bit version of whatever browser you are trying to use, as that will use less memory. Between these two I was able to have a normal browsing experience on even 3GB of memory.
This sounds like Firefox’s tab unloading feature. That link describes how to disable it. I turned it off because I found it annoying, and I have plenty of memory.
If your system really does only have 4GB of ram, then it probably is time to upgrade. Of course, if things were working fine before updating Firefox, then they will probably continue to work fine if you disable tab unloading.
Indeed.
I just opened two browser windows (Chrome) and opened six tabs in each. Chrome by itself is using 2 GB of memory. Of course you need memory for the OS. Not surprising if the system needs to unload pages so it can operate.
I’d say 8GB is the minimum to operate well today with 16GB being preferable (8GB will do fine though for a normal workload of a few tabs open and email).
That reminds me. Adblock is really good for keeping page size down, since you don’t load all that extra junk. I consider it essential in general, but especially so on lower memory computers.
I use uBlock Origin, because it was designed to be both powerful and not use many resources.
Good point. FWIW I was using uBlock Origin as well when reporting my numbers.
Everyone should use uBlock Origin IMHO (it’s free too).