The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs

What I do, when Chrome, or rather, my abuse of it (14 windows, 735 tabs at the moment, Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit on a 32 GiB system) becomes onerous is to go to the task manager and kill groups of tabs taking up &quot;too much&quot; memory, and very occasionally, too much CPU.<p>(I get away with that abuse, which it a <i>bit</i> higher right now because I&#x27;m in the process of buying a house, by killing <i>all</i> tabs after launching, and only enabling the ones I want, one by one, using the essential to me Session Buddy.)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;web&#x2F;updates&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;tab-discarding?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;web&#x2F;updates&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;tab-discar...</a>

It&#x27;s just incredible. Webpages are now filled with such bloat, that there are third party tools popping up to help users combat other third party developer solutions eating up resources on their systems.

A tool that has served me well in freeing up memory (both in RAM and in my head) is one-tab:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.one-tab.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.one-tab.com&#x2F;</a><p>Afaik, current versions of Chrome already implement the functionality of the great suspender natively.

Every single new chrome release memory consumption just gets worse. Most recently a single window with 1 gmail tab takes ~500mb (If I recall correctly you could actually run windows XP on 256).<p>I&#x27;m seriously considering rolling my browsers back to ~2012 and never upgrading again.

Turned that off almost immediately. Sounds good in theory, but if a suspended page has a heartbeat of any sort, it has to reload when you return to it. If that page is an infinite scroller, or if you&#x27;ve hit the &quot;load more&quot; button a couple of times, well, so much for starting up again where you left off.

Just curious - how are you sure that the addon doesn&#x27;t have some backchannel that it&#x27;s using to send your website info to? Like, let&#x27;s say you go on a banking website?

Idea: What if there was an OS interface to mark memory regions as &quot;throwaway&quot;? Throwaway in the sense that it&#x27;s less costly to recalculate than to recall it from swap. So the OS would throw such memory regions instead of swapping out and signal the process about it to recalculate it if needed.<p>I don&#x27;t usually bump into heavy swap usage except when I wake my laptop from hibernate. I tend to close browsers before hibernating because it&#x27;s faster to just resume the last session from a cold start then load from swap.

Another useful tab manager extension for Chrome is Tabli (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gettabli.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gettabli.com</a>), which I created and submitted as a &quot;Show HN&quot; last October (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10464603" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10464603</a>). Helps you quickly find tabs you already have open and lets you save and restore windows (collections of tabs) with meaningful names to keep things organized. 100% Free Software (sources on github), respects privacy, and has keyboard shortcuts for efficiency.

I prefer to &quot;snooze&quot; tabs using the Tab Snooze Chrome Extension. That way they reappear when I can hopefully give them attention. I can tell the extension to put tabs to sleep until this evening, tomorrow, this weekend, next week (my fave), next month, someday (I haven&#x27;t tried that one, too scary), or a specific date. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;tab-snooze&#x2F;pdiebiamhaleloakpcgmpnenggpjbcbm?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;tab-snooze&#x2F;pdiebia...</a>

Google should acquihire the team and embed it in Chrome.<p>I use tabs as a task list (around 30-50 at a time) and without this tool I wouldn&#x27;t be on my laptop, I would need a desktop with at least 64GB of RAM...

The best use of this is for saving battery life. Chrome will absolutely destroy your battery. You can configure it to auto-suspend tabs after X minutes of inactivity only when you are on battery. (Alternatively you can switch to Safari to save battery life.)<p>Like others have said, The Great Suspender will often break web pages and force them to completely reload. This ruins infinite scroller pages too. So thats the trade off.

The Great Suspender has been around for a long time; I posted it to Product Hunt ~2 years ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.producthunt.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;the-great-suspender" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.producthunt.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;the-great-suspender</a><p>it&#x27;s pretty good. I don&#x27;t really use the auto mode much, but I use it to manually kill tabs (can be faster than killing via the task manager)

The Great Suspender allows me to keep many tabs (currently 214) open without CPU meltdown.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;the-great-suspender&#x2F;klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;the-great-suspende...</a>

What happens when a tab is doing background work, such as uploading a file, or performing a calculation, or just keeping track of timer events? (Will those timer events appear to happen all at once when the task is resumed?)

Maybe Google could come up with a zero-cost tab and have users pick it (more than 10 tabs?) when they don&#x27;t care about latency and pre-loading of webpages so much.

Any good alternatives recommended for Firefox?

great chrome addon, been using it for a year or two.<p>I&#x27;ve got around 40-50 tabs open usually, and &quot;spring clean&quot; all but the active one a couple of times a day (right click a tab, close other tabs). Chrome used to be a complete memory hog until this addon.

Closing your tabs and using the browser&#x27;s history achieves the same thing.