Why is my Vivaldi window using *twenty-two gigabytes* of RAM?
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I've been seeing seemingly absurd levels of memory usage from Vivaldi over the last month or two. For a while I attributed it to doing a bunch of work involving Google Maps, but the extreme usage has persisted since moving on to other things. I can reset it by closing Vivaldi and reopening it, but over the course of a few days of normal usage, memory usage seems to balloon to however much RAM I have available. I actually upgraded from 16GB to 32GB hoping it would solve this problem (since on 16GB Vivaldi got so RAM-hungry that I had to restart it every couple of days to keep it from affecting other programs), but even with all that extra space Vivaldi just keeps on eating.
I do have a fair number of tabs kept open (52 ATM), but most of them aren't loaded (since I haven't touched them since reopening Vivaldi), and the ones that are loaded are mostly relatively straightforward webpages - nothing major like a huge Google Maps cache or anything. Most of the actual browsing I do happens in tabs that get closed and replaced fairly frequently.
Is this just an expected consequence of having this many tabs, even though they're mostly not yet loaded? Is there a memory leak somewhere? Am I doing something wrong? Nothing about my browsing habits have changed - I've been doing the same things I've been doing for years, and I even have fewer tabs now than I did a year ago. This all seems to have turned into an issue just over the last month or so, so I can't imagine it's somehow my fault. Vivaldi's memory usage is distributed fairly evenly over a number of processes, none with over 2GB allocated individually, so I don't think it's one particular misbehaving tab or anything.
I'm currently running 5.6.2867.40 on Windows 10 22H2.
What's going on here?
Edit - after posting this, possibly due to just mousing over tab groups to count the tabs inside, Vivaldi's memory usage hit 24GB and the computer started to bog down completely (with 75% of my RAM dedicated solely to Vivaldi), so I closed it with the task manager and now it's sitting at a nice and reasonable 3GB.
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@wonn First, upgrade to the latest version, then it would make sense to start diagnosing the problem.
Shift+Escape will show you which Vivaldi processes are using the RAM.
Do you have any extensions installed?
52 tabs is not excessive, though it is probably more than average.
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@Pesala Ah, thanks for reminding me about the internal task manager. I do have a number of extensions installed, so I'll be paying attention to their reported usage in the internal task manager.
Vivaldi doesn't seem to be reporting any newer version, though - hitting the 'check for updates' button has no effect.
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@Pesala Done. Odd that I couldn't find that browser-internally.
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Alright, having upgraded and waited a few days, I think I have some more visibility on what's going on.
Currently Windows's task manager reports Vivaldi taking up 13GB of RAM, and Vivaldi's internal task manager reports a couple of interesting things. For one, the highest memory user is the 'GPU process', at over 2GB. More oddly, a number of old tabs, which ought to be unloaded and do reload themselves when I click on them, have accumulated over 1GB of dedicated RAM each. Most of these, but definitely not all, are YouTube tabs; some are ostensibly simple text-and-image pages. Almost all of them haven't been opened in many browser close-and-open cycles.
Why do I have old unloaded tabs with over a gigabyte of RAM allocated to each? All they need to hold in RAM is just enough text to know which website to reopen when I click on them, and maybe where I was on the page. Is this a side effect of an intentional design choice, or a memory leak bug?
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@wonn I remember that some Chromium core version does hibernate tabs after a while, but i can not tell which on Vivaldi Stable or Snapshot.
You can Hibernate background tabs by F2 → type
Hibernate
or on tab context menu → Hibernate Background Tabs -
@DoctorG Well, that made a difference. Dang! I'm curious why that's not the default state of the browser in general - when you open a new window and have your session recover, why it doesn't just leave all the tabs hibernated to begin with.
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@wonn Some hints to reduce consumption:
https://vivaldi.com/blog/improve-performance-in-vivaldi/ -
@DoctorG Doesn't really tell me why tabs in a saved session don't start hibernated (^^)
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@wonn Not implemented to start a saved session hibernated.
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@DoctorG Odd! Seems like it should be the default behaviour - if you load a set of tabs for whatever reason, they should all start hibernated. Time to put in a feature request, I suppose!
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@wonn https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/257971 could help you?
A relevant feature request could be : https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/28266/lazy-load-for-sessions