Practical ways to get Vivaldi to use less RAM/disk
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No-one else have these problems, or have suggests as how to avoid it?
Anyway, one thing I've noticed is that closing tabs or hibernating them results in Activity Monitor reporting a large increase in RAM usage. This can lock up the system for a time. In particular, hibernating a tab stack in my experience is grabbing around 400-500Mb of RAM (AM's values). Of course the idea of hibernating is to reduce the amount of RAM usage. One thing that might help is if it could be coded so that it's less inclined to grab large amounts of RAM temporarily.
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@GrantJacobs The only suggestions that come to mind, you won't like
- Have less tabs open
- Use less extensions
Vivaldi uses the chromium engine, this means separate processes (and hence more RAM usage) for each TAB and extension.
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Thanks. I'm ware of both. Open tabs is implied in my opening discussion. I only use three extensions, in total they take <80Mb RAM. I can't remove these as they're the reason I've tried to move to Vivaldi in the first place. The latest security moves by Apple mean that Zotero won't work in Safari anymore, and that bibliographical software is central to my work flow. The others extensions ditto.
Vivaldi seems a huge memory either way. I have just two tabs open. Total RAM usage according to Task Manager is about 1Gb! 'Browser' is using ~420Mb. 'Background Page: Vivaldi' is using another ~380Mb. (I can't find any information on this.)
One thing that does help a little is to turn off hardware acceleration. 'GPU' with hardware acceleration uses ~220Mb RAM. With HW acceleration off it’s about 24Mb RAM. (It's also a MASSIVE hit on the CPU, running it very hot and eating up the battery - ~50% battery use in about an hour.)
Turning off opening pinned tabs at start up helps a bit, but all this is in context of with just two tabs open using ~1Gb…
(FWIW I come from programming since TRS-80/Apple ][ days. 64Kb RAM. I find it very hard to believe some of the bloat today is genuinely necessary. It's hard to know what bits are Chromium's doing or the Vivaldi team's, but it'd be lovely if a point of difference were that the browser was lean in use.)
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@GrantJacobs said in Practical ways to get Vivaldi to use less RAM/disk:
One thing that does help a little is to turn off hardware acceleration. 'GPU' with hardware acceleration uses ~220Mb RAM. With HW acceleration off it’s about 24Mb RAM. (It's also a MASSIVE hit on the CPU, running it very hot and eating up the battery - ~50% battery use in about an hour.)
There are quite a few threads about GPU problems on MACs (I hadn't noticed this was a MAC thread, sorry).
'Browser' is using ~420Mb. 'Background Page: Vivaldi' is using another ~380Mb. (I can't find any information on this.)
WOW - for comparison, I currently have 4 TABS open (1 Youtube, paused; and 3 this forum)
Browser -> 102.2 Mb
GPU (h/w acc on) -> 153.2 Mb
Background -> 98.4 MbI don't know if MACs are all that bad! Have to wait for another MAC user to comment.
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@GrantJacobs That definitely doesn't look right but I'm not sure what could be causing this.
Folks have always complained that Vivaldi's memory consumption is excessive but that's typically due to extensions and the complexity of the sites that they visit. Others have also had some really weird things happen after changing some of the underlying vivaldi://flags; they should be kept at their defaults and only changed if absolutely necessary.
FYI, a few years ago, I did a little experiment where I profiled Vivaldi from a default install and got its memory consumption down to a point where it was comparable to Google Chrome. I could have gotten that number even lower if I disabled the "Use Animation" and other "eye candy" and also disabled other features in Settings that I did not need.
Right now, my main Vivaldi 2.2 process, according to Activity Monitor) is using 68.0 MB, I have a bunch of Helper processes that consume between 12 and 150MB, and if I look in VTM, my GPU process is using 150MB.
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@xyzzy said in Practical ways to get Vivaldi to use less RAM/disk:
@GrantJacobs That definitely doesn't look right but I'm not sure what could be causing this.
Well, it's what's there eh I'd like to be able to sort this out.
FWIW, I was hoping to write a post giving V a shout-out, but have had so much trouble I'm facing having to consider giving people a heads-up as to a potential time-waster (what it has been for me so far). Not what I had hoped for, but I had to reflect my experiences, etc.
Folks have always complained that Vivaldi's memory consumption is excessive but that's typically due to extensions and the complexity of the sites that they visit. Others have also had some really weird things happen after changing some of the underlying vivaldi://flags; they should be kept at their defaults and only changed if absolutely necessary.
I haven't touched any 'flags' - your comment is the first I've learnt of them.
My impression of those that I've read is that none of them had their excess resolved. Certainly I've never seen someone point at 'flags'.
It's just possible it's the latest update, but I'd like to think there'd have been more complaints if it were.
FYI, a few years ago, I did a little experiment where I profiled Vivaldi from a default install and got its memory consumption down to a point where it was comparable to Google Chrome. I could have gotten that number even lower if I disabled the "Use Animation" and other "eye candy" and also disabled other features in Settings that I did not need.
I've already disabled all the eye-candy stuff I can find.
Right now, my main Vivaldi 2.2 process, according to Activity Monitor) is using 68.0 MB, I have a bunch of Helper processes that consume between 12 and 150MB, and if I look in VTM, my GPU process is using 150MB.
I've never seen it remotely like this
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@GrantJacobs Have you tried disabling ALL of your extensions (to see if that makes any difference) and then re-enabling them one-by-one? I know that you need all of your extensions for your work but if this turns out to be an extensions-related issue, you can file a bug and the Vivaldi team can then hopefully replicate it and resolve it.
I'm aware of hibernating tabs / stacks. They sound promising, although the help blog isn't clear as to precisely what hibernating does. It gives an Apple-speak like "uses less resources".
Vivaldi's "Tab Hibernation" takes advantage of Chromium's Tab Discarding to reduce Vivaldi's memory footprint when a user has many tabs open. (That Google blog post is old, but it gives a nice summary.) Vivaldi's "Lazy Load" feature also places tabs into a "discarded" state when you launch Vivaldi and resume your last session.
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@xyzzy said in Practical ways to get Vivaldi to use less RAM/disk:
@GrantJacobs Have you tried disabling ALL of your extensions (to see if that makes any difference) and then re-enabling them one-by-one? I know that you need all of your extensions for your work but if this turns out to be an extensions-related issue, you can file a bug and the Vivaldi team can then hopefully replicate it and resolve it.
I thought of this, but am a bit busy ATM. Will try later.
I'm aware of hibernating tabs / stacks. They sound promising, although the help blog isn't clear as to precisely what hibernating does. It gives an Apple-speak like "uses less resources".
Vivaldi's "Tab Hibernation" takes advantage of Chromium's Tab Discarding to reduce Vivaldi's memory footprint when a user has many tabs open. (That Google blog post is old, but it gives a nice summary.) Vivaldi's "Lazy Load" feature also places tabs into a "discarded" state when you launch Vivaldi and resume your last session.
Thanks for the link, will read later. Will try to look for info on what 'Background Page: Vivaldi' is later, too.
FWIW, there's an irony in all of this. (*For me, anyway.) The blog post on how to manage memory in Vivaldi says to keep an eye on processes that increase in RAM over time (i.e. might be leaking). The only ones that do for me are Vivaldi ones… The pages and extensions stay more-or-less sane, if on the large size for many pages. But even the GPU process creeps up, from ~20+ Mb to ~120. And the 'Browser' process gets huge. 'Background Page: Vivaldi' is big, but doesn't seem (subjective observation!) to grow as fast. These seem to be the thing that knocking Vivaldi over and restarting "fixes".
Maybe it's just that Chromium having grabbed some memory for something just doesn't like releasing it? 'Browser' and 'Background Page: Vivaldi' only slightly reduce if hibernate all background tabs. They're still at ~700Mb and ~300Mb, respectively.
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Just a follow-up. Not having much joy. Extensions or not the Vivaldi processes bloat over time.
Anecdotally there appears to be a pattern where if you close or hibernate a tab, memory use briefly rises, then drops a little, but never returns to close to the usage before the tab was opened. The effect is over time the 'Browser' process in particular bloats - now >1.1Gb with only the one foreground tab not hibernated.
'Background Page: Vivaldi' also rises over time, ditto for 'GPU Process'.
Hibernating all background tabs seems to do nothing to help this.
Edit: should add this is with all extensions closed (not removed, just closed in the extensions panel).
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I might close this as on-going and unresolved.
I have read a few bits but Vivaldi remains a massive memory and CPU hog. The tab hibernation doesn't appear to do what you'd wish - it initially temporarily increases RAM usage, tying up the machine, then does reduce it somewhat but never to the level without the tab open. The effect over time is that Vivaldi's RAM usage grows, even if you hibernate all other tabs.
The only not-really-a-solution I have found to to repeatedly quit the browser and start again. It seems to be the only reliable way of getting it to actually "hibernate" the other tabs. A catch here is that quitting itself tries to grab a lot of RAM and often completely ties up the system for quite a while.
I would really like to see memory management that actually managed as it were. I would love to see Vivaldi's focus shift slightly from "advanced tabbing" etc., to advanced management, including ways to to miserly with RAM (and/or CPU) if that what a given user needs.
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@GrantJacobs There may be technical reasons why a tab cannot be discarded and sometimes the only thing that you can do is to close the tab. (There's an internal debugging URL that lists whether or not a tab can be frozen or discarded but often the reason listed is something cryptic like: "Origin is temporarily protected while under observation.")
You mentioned that you are using Zotero... what other extensions do you have installed? How many tabs do you have open?
Have you tried creating a new user account on your Mac and using a new/clean Vivaldi installation in its default configuration with no extensions?
I can't relate to the problems that you describe either so, again, this could be caused by the extensions that you are using and the particular sites that you have loaded... or that Vivaldi is acting strangely due to a corrupted user profile (the collection of files/databases where Vivaldi stores its configuration settings, extensions, and other related working files)
If a particular set of sites and/or extensions are causing unusually high system resource usage, then please consider filing a detailed bug report so the Vivaldi team can replicate and investigate this issue further.
You might also want to consider installing Google Chrome to see if you still run into the same issues with that browser.
The other harsh reality is that you might simply need more RAM to support your workflow.
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