AWS has a similar RAM consumption. I close Signal to make sure it doesn't crash and corrupt the message history when I need to open more than one browser tab with AWS in the work VM. I think after you click a few pages, one AWS tab was something like 1.4GB (edit: found it in message history, yes it was "20% of 7GB" = 1.4GB precisely)
Does anyone else have the feeling they run into this sort of thing more often of late? Simple pages with just text on it that take gigabytes (AWS), or pages that look simple but it takes your browser everything it has to render it at what looks like 22 fps? (Reddit's new UI and various blogs I've come across.) Or the page runs smoothly but your CPU lifts off while the tab is in the foreground? (e.g. DeepL's translator)
Every time I wonder if they had an LLM try to get some new feature or bugfix to work and it made poor choices performance-wise, but it completes unit tests so the LLM thinks it's done and also visually looks good on their epic developer machines
I don't understand who uses that network anymore. Everytime I login it's all ai generated stories next to ai generated flavor images of people sounding like a parody of themselves ("what taking my kids to school taught me about business scaling").
Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels like an episode of Severance?
That's peanuts. LI's third-party bot prevention service, "protechts.net", took 42 GB RAM on my laptop with 32 GB the other day. Obviously found out because it got suspiciously slow and wheezing, and Firefox swapping like crazy seemed to be the culprit. Looking at its performance, this scare jump happened: [1].
I have to say I haven't spotted anything at this brutality scale neither before, not after this incident. Also, I had no third-party adblocking software deployed, just Firefox's native defaults. (I use quite a few other extensions, userscripts and userstyles, though, so I cannot rule out some clash induced by them.)
I see LI is using protechts.net stuff in hidden iframes with charming id="humanThirdPartyIframe" and even nicer id="humanSecurityEnforcerIframe". Lovely!
Let's be real, LinkedIn is full of LinkedIn Lunatics but pretty much all mainstream social media is pretty shit. They're just different flavors of shit. LinkedIn: bad. Facebook: bad. Twitter: I literally think it contributed to the collapse of discourse and rise of shallow thought / rejection of expertise. I'm not going to list more because the theme is, you guessed it, they're bad.
Google+ had promise in that the many problems of the other platforms could be curtailed with tooling to make your social experience effectively local (not necessarily geographically).
Back in the ancient days of the web, browsers allowed you to set resource limits (ram, cache, etc) to prevent websites from hogging the limited resources of your desktop system.
It's really a shame that all major browsers have since decided that you as a user should have almost no control over how much ram and storage any arbitrary website can consume now.
While awful I would like for someone to explain what's in that 1.3GB.
In fact it's one of my major sources of unsatisfied curiousity is for someone to show a breakdown of a memory dump of a browser, to see, what happens to those gigabytes of memory consumed.
I have heard an explanation that browsers just use free ram, because unused ram is wasted, but that feels flimsy to me. It's not the browsers job to hog ram on the off chance it might need it, just ask the OS when you actually do.
I remember touring a chemistry lab in college and one student asked the panel of chemists how much LinkedIn mattered in their industry and they paused until one chemist asks “what is LinkedIn?”
I wish someone would build a LinkedIn that was actually good. That you could actually do business over, and no I don't mean spam people with you BS cold emails which must have a 10000:1 success rate. I wrote a bit about this almost a decade ago and there is nothing.[1]
As much as you all dislike LinkedIn and the cringy posts, keep in mind that for certain parts of the market it is >the< main professional forum. It is where your investors live, and their capital providers live. So, play nice, yeah?
Nearly all the top level comments are about the value of Linkedin at all rather than the technical reasons that 2.4G of RAM for a website is atrocious.
Can we talk about how it's possible that any application short of video editing can require so much RAM?
In fact, I've done video editing on computers with 1GiB of RAM back in 2004 and it worked fine, (for the 1024x768 resolution which was en vogue at the time)..
Is linkedin doing something complex? Is there a reason that it requires more resources than my entire computer from 20 years ago, or my entire operating system, text editor and compiler today?
As someone pointed out below, the problem is not entirely (or even mostly) LinkedIn. HN, a text-only website, consumes several hundred MB of RAM on his Mac. On Firefox on my Windows computer, each HN tab I have open consumes at least 30 MB of RAM...for pure text...
The bigger problem is that browsers these days are not very resource efficient because the programmers behind them have powerful top-of-the-line computers that hide all the inefficiencies (or at the very least, computers significantly more powerful than what their users use). This is compounded by the web developers of most websites also using similarly powerful computers for their development, which hides all of the inefficiencies in the website code. This leads to the clusterfuck of LinkedIn using up 2.4GB of RAM across two tabs (though on my computer 2 tabs only uses up about 600 MB even after a few minutes of scrolling).
It turns out that focusing on developer productivity to the exclusion of the user experience has huge negative externalities. Who would have known? (Answer: Literally everybody who was a programmer before the developer-first mentality took over tech.)
The solution: make browser and website developers use slower and less powerful computers than their average user/visitor will use. The performance issues would be identified and addressed immediately.
In a RAM starved world — LinkedIn deserves fewer users. In fact, no users. This service is sadly one of the most useless things out there, right next to Facebook.
It's not just memory. I've never been able to scroll back more than about 6 days in the LinkedIn feed. I slows to a crawl and this was on a gaming machine with 64GB of ram. I tried raising all the limits in the browser with only marginal gains. If they had an option to instead use pagination with say 100 items per page I think it might get a little better.
I wonder how we might avoid this. It seems like often on this site we talk about matters of taste: like examples of good and bad systems. I wonder if there's a book focused on developing taste as an engineer, designer, etc in systems.
I've noticed that most books on software engineering are overly academic or focus too much on process. I feel like if you wanted to avoid something like the LinkedIn example you would need to make a meme book that was so simple, pervasive, and widely known that it could even reach an executive (for them to know whether or not work was actually good.)
That is probably like ... naive of me to say though.
I rarely use Linkedin but for my new app that I'm building the Linkedin is good platform to find out & engage possible customers so last few weeks I'm using it more. But man.. so sorry for people using it daily. Such a bad experience. I didn't surprise it takes that amount of RAM because every component in the page is laggy, you feel very unsafe. You're getting some error but you have no idea what it is. Don't wanna mention about the content at all. But like many people mentioned in the comments it's still the number one place for their work
LinkedIN, showing why Reactive is such a good idea by refusing to use it....
No joke, app constantly shows stale posts and stories,,almost like their devs do not understand what the limits to MVVM are for state....rookie mistake
I was searching for jobs using it a while ago and it consumed 80 percent of my iphone’s battery in under 40 minutes. It’s quite impressive. Not even highest end mobile games can do that.
I keep my profile updated as a consultant because it lets clients and others in my company get a fuller gauge than my one pager. I’ve also got my most recent and prior job from having a price and responding to the right recruiter, I’ve also had a handful of interviews as well, which is honestly more than I’ve gotten from trying to apply to random job board postings.
We're back in the IE era (now with chrome and other browsers) where websites are bloated with ton of js, css, websockets, background services hogging memory.
May be its time for browser vendors to show the consumption (right now they show memory usage) by features i.e background service, websockets, etc.,
With option to disable background service workers.
The performance of both the website and the iOS app is also not great. On the iOS app, I frequently see frames dropped and scrolling is sometimes blocked for up to a second or more at a time.
LinkedIn's feed is certainly not simple, but modern iPhones should be more than capable of rendering it at 60fps.
The behaviour is a bit weird - I just opened mine and in Chrome task manager it showed the ram use climbing to 2.8GB, but in the network console it only shows a few 10s of mb download. I wonder what the discrepancy is? The site seemed to notice the console was open and behaved differently also.
And on the same topic again, it's not "LinkedIn" but some managers most likely in marketing and tech who allowed this amount of bloatware. And I won't believe this RAM usage is really needed just for displaying static content or chat. It's like always trackers and ads.
This is the part about the "wasm won't replace JavaScript" argument I see being slept on and why I am so disheartened about how practically no progress has been made on it.
Most trivial apps don't need to be optimized, and for them, JavaScript is fine.
But for complex interactive web applications - it really fuggin matters.
Think;
- vscode
- facebook
- jira
- linkedin
- reddit
There's no reason these applications should be slow, single threaded, and consume gigabytes of memory - but that's a limitation of the technology.
I know first hand that Atlassian has spent millions of dollars building bundlers in different forms just to save a few milliseconds of load time.
Just let me write the front end in Rust and if the browser detects that no JavaScript is running - don't start a JavaScript engine.
While you're at it, improve the SharedWorker story so I can effectively share data between tabs (enables cross tab sync, great for chat apps and local caching). I recently tried to make an offline-only application with a wasm-based sqlite implementation in a SharedWorker and the API just doesn't work.
I think it is an accomplishment to bloat a website to a point where the user needs to download 40-100mb per page. Even if I try, I can't find the right JS files to make it that large. How do they even make JS files this big?
They do other unholy things. I don’t know what, but consistently while playing music on my HomePod opening that site makes it stutter within a few minutes, fully stop working shortly afterwards and it needs a reboot to work again.
I don't understand why people get so hung up on Chrome using so much memory. A lot of this memory is "discardable" so will get dropped when the system is under memory pressure and the amount of memory allocated for this type of usage will depend on how much memory your system has available. If Chrome is using lots of memory then it's almost always because your system has lots of available memory. It allows the browser to cache large images and video assets that would otherwise have to be re-downloaded over the internet.
on my device (running chrome with one extension), this page is consuming ~100 MB.
not to takeaway from the obviously bloated website discussed here, but i wonder who much of this is an overhead from the browser than the page bloat itself.
456 comments
Does anyone else have the feeling they run into this sort of thing more often of late? Simple pages with just text on it that take gigabytes (AWS), or pages that look simple but it takes your browser everything it has to render it at what looks like 22 fps? (Reddit's new UI and various blogs I've come across.) Or the page runs smoothly but your CPU lifts off while the tab is in the foreground? (e.g. DeepL's translator)
Every time I wonder if they had an LLM try to get some new feature or bugfix to work and it made poor choices performance-wise, but it completes unit tests so the LLM thinks it's done and also visually looks good on their epic developer machines
Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels like an episode of Severance?
I have to say I haven't spotted anything at this brutality scale neither before, not after this incident. Also, I had no third-party adblocking software deployed, just Firefox's native defaults. (I use quite a few other extensions, userscripts and userstyles, though, so I cannot rule out some clash induced by them.)
I see LI is using protechts.net stuff in hidden iframes with charming id="humanThirdPartyIframe" and even nicer id="humanSecurityEnforcerIframe". Lovely!
[1] https://pasteboard.co/9eDQ84szy3d9.jpg
Just close the tabs and never open LinkedIn again.
Google+ had promise in that the many problems of the other platforms could be curtailed with tooling to make your social experience effectively local (not necessarily geographically).
It's really a shame that all major browsers have since decided that you as a user should have almost no control over how much ram and storage any arbitrary website can consume now.
In fact it's one of my major sources of unsatisfied curiousity is for someone to show a breakdown of a memory dump of a browser, to see, what happens to those gigabytes of memory consumed.
I have heard an explanation that browsers just use free ram, because unused ram is wasted, but that feels flimsy to me. It's not the browsers job to hog ram on the off chance it might need it, just ask the OS when you actually do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46904361
[1] https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
Then I realised that it was a bit too impressive.
The possibility that a website would use 2.4gb ram did not even occur to me. What is it even doing with all that memory?
For reference civilisation 4 is runnable with 2gb ram.
LinkedIn in 2026 means a social media full of slope AI posts where folks interact with it without noticing it.
Relationship posts, and even OF alike posts that you only see on Instagram/X
Linkedin is not longer a platform focused into work and networking.
Can we talk about how it's possible that any application short of video editing can require so much RAM?
In fact, I've done video editing on computers with 1GiB of RAM back in 2004 and it worked fine, (for the 1024x768 resolution which was en vogue at the time)..
Is linkedin doing something complex? Is there a reason that it requires more resources than my entire computer from 20 years ago, or my entire operating system, text editor and compiler today?
Why not?
The bigger problem is that browsers these days are not very resource efficient because the programmers behind them have powerful top-of-the-line computers that hide all the inefficiencies (or at the very least, computers significantly more powerful than what their users use). This is compounded by the web developers of most websites also using similarly powerful computers for their development, which hides all of the inefficiencies in the website code. This leads to the clusterfuck of LinkedIn using up 2.4GB of RAM across two tabs (though on my computer 2 tabs only uses up about 600 MB even after a few minutes of scrolling).
It turns out that focusing on developer productivity to the exclusion of the user experience has huge negative externalities. Who would have known? (Answer: Literally everybody who was a programmer before the developer-first mentality took over tech.)
The solution: make browser and website developers use slower and less powerful computers than their average user/visitor will use. The performance issues would be identified and addressed immediately.
other avenues - local slack channels.
linkedIn - good for initial connection with strangers you don't know and might find valuable
linkedIn - good for keeping tabs on companies or new startups
I've noticed that most books on software engineering are overly academic or focus too much on process. I feel like if you wanted to avoid something like the LinkedIn example you would need to make a meme book that was so simple, pervasive, and widely known that it could even reach an executive (for them to know whether or not work was actually good.)
That is probably like ... naive of me to say though.
Even for that though, I've never used it, and I don't feel like I'm missing out.
No joke, app constantly shows stale posts and stories,,almost like their devs do not understand what the limits to MVVM are for state....rookie mistake
May be its time for browser vendors to show the consumption (right now they show memory usage) by features i.e background service, websockets, etc.,
With option to disable background service workers.
LinkedIn's feed is certainly not simple, but modern iPhones should be more than capable of rendering it at 60fps.
I only open LinkedIn... very rarely. When done, I just close it.
Don't scroll. Don't read stories. Don't do anything except message recruiters. Get them into email or a phone call. That's it. Fuck LinkedIn.
Most trivial apps don't need to be optimized, and for them, JavaScript is fine.
But for complex interactive web applications - it really fuggin matters.
Think; - vscode
- facebook
- jira
- linkedin
- reddit
There's no reason these applications should be slow, single threaded, and consume gigabytes of memory - but that's a limitation of the technology.
I know first hand that Atlassian has spent millions of dollars building bundlers in different forms just to save a few milliseconds of load time.
Just let me write the front end in Rust and if the browser detects that no JavaScript is running - don't start a JavaScript engine.
While you're at it, improve the SharedWorker story so I can effectively share data between tabs (enables cross tab sync, great for chat apps and local caching). I recently tried to make an offline-only application with a wasm-based sqlite implementation in a SharedWorker and the API just doesn't work.
not to takeaway from the obviously bloated website discussed here, but i wonder who much of this is an overhead from the browser than the page bloat itself.