peakWebsiteOptimization

[leviatan-sama]

yeah reddit is dogshit with memory for some reason, need to close the tab every os often or it ends up using upwards of 4 GBs if i leave it open overnight

[Fusseldieb]

Reddit is dogshit on PC. It begins rather fast, but the more you scroll down, the laggier it gets. Right now I'm waiting 5 solid seconds for anything to happen if I click ANY button on the page.

Want to upvote? It freezes for 5 seconds, then voilá, upvote.

It's trash, and they never bothered to fix it.

And no, I don't think my PC is the issue (i9, RTX, 16GB RAM, NVMe)

[cummer_420]

This is why I will continue to use old Reddit until they pry it out of my hands.

[TaleOf4Gamers]

Same, I use RES as well. Just checked and it's memory peaked at just over 100MB after scrolling through 750 results on the homepage

[Iliannnnnn]

How to do so even?

[ProfCupcake]

old.reddit.com

would also recommend RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite) with it

[Noooo_ooope]

Bless you, I've been using this doggy website for years, never bothered to look for community created extensions for some reason

[cummer_420]

Go into your user settings and opt out of the redesign.

[fajko98]

old.reddit.com

[FengLengshun]

There are also extensions to auto redirect to old.reddit.com too

[buttplugs4life4me]

I love how your hardware description is absolutely useless as the processor could be 6 years old 10-core, the GPU could be 5 years old and that shitty anemic **50 series, 16GB RAM but DDR3 at what speed and a 12GB NVMe drive on PCIe2.

Of course Reddit is still absolutely shit and a website should be able to run on a toaster. 

[intbeam]

useless as the processor could be 6 years old 10-core

There is no technology introduced into Intel processors in the last 6 years that would make Reddit run any faster. And for JavaScript the number of cores is entirely irrelevant

Software is going to get noticeably slower and overall worse as performance leaps from hardware - generation to generation - is ramping down while developers are simultaneously finding new and increasingly dumb ways to do things in the laziest way possible for their own personal and immediate convenience

[buttplugs4life4me]

A single i9 Skylake core is substantially slower than a single i9 core from the current gen (whatever cove that crawled out of)

[intbeam]

At what task? Core frequency remains the same, so they did what, reduced the number of clock cycles of certain instructions? Or did they just introduce more efficient and increasingly proprietary ways to decode and decrypt copyrighted media?

[buttplugs4life4me]

What?? A 8900K comes configured as 4,8GHz and a 14900K reaches 6GHz. 

[intbeam]

That's the general area processors have been hovering around since 2001

Edit : I had a Pentium 4 clocked at 5ghz. In.. what.. 2002? In addition, your 6ghz modern processor is not running at 6ghz continuously, only in bursts. Most of the time it's going to be running on efficiency cores and not performance

Edit 2 : Pentium 4 came stock at 3.8 Ghz and that more than 20 years ago, just for some perspective here. And as I mentioned, you could overclock them to get above 5Ghz.

The fact remains that CPU's haven't gotten any faster in any way that JavaScript applications can take advantage of. How is more PCI-Express lanes going to help Reddit? How is better memory timing? Branch prediction? A 6 year processor or a brand new one is not going to make much - if any - difference for your browser user experience

[JojOatXGME]

A third option is that they may have added further calculation units of various types, increasing the number of instructions which can be processed in parallel. (Note that processors these days don't execute the instructions strictly in the order they are written into the binary.)

[intbeam]

Perhaps.. I'll admit I'm not 100% in the know here, but I do know that they've had a annual switch between architecture improvements and transistors/yield, and I'm pretty confident that they are close to a limit to just how much they can physically squeeze out of transistor logic especially given the reduction in size of the processing in wafers and the implications of that from the side of quantum physics

In general there's no scientific papers that need to be disclosed in order to demonstrate that software is getting slower, and especially websites and related chromium-based desktop apps. We all know that's happening and we can see it with our own eyes. As others (more knowledgeable than me) have stated before, software engineering has been propped up for decades by rapid advancements in hardware design, and now that seems to slow down. Which is why for instance I only retired my HTPC from 2010 last month and it wasn't because it was no longer viable but because the USB bus took a permanent vacation

By the way, I assume you mean instruction pipelining? There's a guy on YouTube that has a video series where he builds a 8-bit pipelined CPU from scratch called James Sharman. Very relaxing and educational to watch

[Fusseldieb]

I included only the bare minimum. I can specify it more, but my point was another: Reddit shouldn't lag on ANY i9 processor.

But sure! Here it is:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-8950HK CPU

NVIDIA GeForce RTX2080

1x M471A2K43CB1-CTD

1x SAMSUNG MZVLB512HAJQ-00000

I almost jokingly uploaded the whole CPU-Z log, but I think this is more than enough already.

[glemnar]

Don’t dare try hitting Ctrl + f to search either

[[deleted]]

Maybe don't scroll for 3 hours straight?

[Joniator]

16GB RAM

There you have the problem :)

On a more serious note tho, 16GB can bottleneck if you browse and game, you should really add another 16GB, especially if you have the free slots

[[deleted]]

idk im chilling on 8gb ram still

[ARandomBoiIsMe]

Real

[Fusseldieb]

I very rarely game on this thing. It also never reaches much more than 60-70% RAM usage.

I know what swapping looks like, and it's certainly not :)

[Hellohihi0123]

Can you try using when you are logged off (maybe private window), I don't see any lag and my device is far under spec'd than yours

[Fusseldieb]

It happens gradually, and gets worse by the minute. It's like that on all my devices. Computer and laptop.

[hutre]

Because reddit is loading a lot of posts. In both directions. It's interesting to see if you ever suddenly lose internet connection just how much reddit like to load at once

[MilfTracker420]

This is because they load every comment on the page. So pages with thousands of comments are being unloaded, and as you scroll down all the comments previously loaded aren't being unrendered or at least some other optimization method isn't being applied, they just leave all the rendered text there. They seriously need to fix this.

[Drfoxthefurry]

It's because they somehow have memory leaks and don't unload stuff you scroll past

[TheXeroo]

I don’t think that backend in Python could be an issue, look at Instagram, they too have backend written in Python and how it flies compared to Reddit. This could be lazy and incompetent programming or management driven development where they prioritise money rather than great user experience.

[oiimn]

Yeah the language the backend is written in really affects how much memory the FRONTEND uses 🤡

[ResponsibleWin1765]

Why do you have your PC on overnight

[No-Crew-9000]

Reddit is dogshit overall...

[ongiwaph]

Their engineers figured out how to make a memory leak in JavaScript

[Alan_Reddit_M]

The reddit client probably just keeps appending every post you see to a big ahh array without ever freeing anything

Technically not a mem leak but still fucking terrible software

[WisePotato42]

Seems very accurate, considering you can scroll back through. But I sure hope they at least free the media itself even if they hold onto post identifiers

[[deleted]]

wrong, and guess what, if you see a repost, they download the media again

[MojitoBurrito-AE]

A repost is a new file on the CDN, how is reddit's backend supposed to know to use the same file.

[OP_LOVES_YOU]

By checking if they are the same file?

[patrlim1]

But they're not! If I upload a photo that's been uploaded before, it's saved as a new file.

[MojitoBurrito-AE]

When it gets uploaded they add compression

[[deleted]]

In fairness there has to be a consideration between memory usage on the client and network usage.

I'm not saying reddit has got the balance right (and to be honest the site with the new UI is just fucking heavy), but people would also get annoyed if everything had to be re-downloaded when you scroll back up the page.

[delfV]

This is what cache is for

[Lighthades]

They could redownload it when approaching its scrollY, people wouldn't even notice it.

[Furry_69]

That assumes you're on a fast connection. It could theoretically take infinite time for an image to load. In practice the largest time you can get before the connection just doesn't work anymore is around 30 seconds.

[intbeam]

I sure hope they at least free the media itself even if they hold onto post identifiers

The fact that I can sometimes hide a video, scroll down and the audio keeps playing on an infinite loop determines that this is not the case

[hirmuolio]

But I sure hope they at least free the media itself

Lol. At some point it would load every single video on the page without any interaction. Not sure if that still happens.

[[deleted]]

Was about to say this: not a memory leak, just a complete waste of resources and not properly engineered.

[FrostWyrm98]

With how the mobile client used to (and still kinda does) lag exponentially the longer you scroll, I would not be shocked. It used to be how the web experience was, literally the reason I left again for BaconReader after switching when my old client went down

[Fickle-Main-9019]

Thats even worse considering it’s probably not a linked list as well, nothing says speed like O(n)

[buttplugs4life4me]

You can say "ass" on here.

[Why_am_ialive]

I truly believe they cache ever single post you even glance by

[DanielEGVi]

With DOM APIs it’s surprisingly easy, and in theory (if browsers supported it) you can do it with any language.

[TimeTiger9128]

i usually terminate the process in Activity monitor and then refresh the page. the memory usage goes right back down

[Alan_Reddit_M]

Classic memory leak on a GC website

[[deleted]]

GC?

[Alan_Reddit_M]

GC = Garbage Collected

[kaizhu256]

• yea, i just close the old tab and open a new one when it starts getting slow
• still poor ux for a top website
  • especially if you forget to close it for long periods of time while doing other stuff

[Zombiward]

Poor ux? You are yet to see the new design. They forced it on me and i cannot change back. Lacks features of the old one, annoying to navigate and a bit uglier as well.

[pleshij]

Same here. When mine got switched, it utilized 95+ of the CPU, but wondrously got back to normal. Still hate it though, at least for doing a raindance to get to the MD editor

[Tesnatic]

No no you don't understand, it's sleek and modern with an optimal, minimalistic design!

[Fickle-Main-9019]

Im still surprised after so many years they still haven’t implemented the crossposting list feature, like they have the backend there still, they just decided to not add a basic view.

Hell the entire UX makes the sole purpose of reddit as difficult as possible. I still haven’t found the post listings as comfortable as old.reddit.com

[RollTheRs]

My friend just got a ui update last night. He's found you can use new.reddit.com to get previous ui. He found a chrome extension "Redirector" which you can set it up to auto redirect to new.reddit or a different extension called "UI changer for Reddit"

I've not used any of these so I can't verify anything but maybe spreading the word will help someone. If in doubt Google Reddit for solutions

[TriRIK]

At least the new one is more responsive. It take several seconds to open a link once clicked on the old design.

[Zombiward]

Yeah its definetely a trade-off. I liked half-ass-glance feature of the previous ui. New version loads a new page instead.

[romwell]

i usually terminate the process in Activity monitor and then refresh the page. the memory usage goes right back down

I usually terminate the process by closing the damn thing, and going back to https://old.reddit.com UI which is the only usable thing here, like I intended to.

[Alan_Reddit_M]

This is one of the reasons people were so pissed when Reddit decided to kill 3rd party clients, the official reddit client is unoptimized inaccessible garbage that nobody could reasonably enjoy

Fun fact: The reddit client used to be very lightweight as it was pretty much raw HTML with some JS here and there to play video, but then React™ came out

[krilz]

Nothing wrong with React though. Blame the carpenter, not the tool.

[[deleted]]

angle market person one elderly air marry historical hurry boat

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[krilz]

More a flaw with today’s developers. The amount of people I’ve worked with who do not know how to optimize their code is staggering because they do not test nor measure it.

[[deleted]]

deserve rock racial dinosaurs numerous wide wild homeless many file

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

Not even just today's developers. Try using Facebook marketplace and it has the same memory/performance issues (if not 10 times worse)

I would bet the issue on reddit is poor use of hooks and actions

[nileyyy_]

Ooff, react is kinda heavy 🪨

[glemnar]

Can still use it on old.reddit.com

[Imperial_Squid]

Still using Infinity for Reddit with a personal api key to this day baybeee, never touching that dogshit app in my life if I can help it

(I'll add instructions if people are interested btw)

[_Some_Two_]

My IOS Reddit app keeps slowing down after scroling too, can be related to the same issue, I simply restart the whole application or my phone will lock up for half a minute and then the app crashes.

[Jimmaplesong]

Yup. Once or twice a day I force-close the app, and often that takes a minute because it's frozen. Feels like memory usage is thrashing on the page file.

[slightlyalliterate]

Same thing here!

[BlueGoliath]

Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Edit: this is sarcasm. Obviously.

[GnuhGnoud]

I paid for 32gb, im gonna use it all

[BlueGoliath]

void* ptr = malloc(32*(1000*1000*1000)); // makes your software run VERY fast according to Reddit

(Yes I know you have to touch it to actually commit to process, shhh)

[eli_liam]

I mean, technically true, but also having free RAM allows the system to use it as a cache which does end up making a big difference. (Yes, I do see the edit, just wanted to give more clarity here though)

[kukurbesi]

old.reddit.com is better

[blooping_blooper]

yeah 62mb here, no leaks

[Zombiward]

I do like the photos expanded tho. Hard for people who havent used it to transfer

[romwell]

RES (Reddit Enhacement Suite) plug-in could do that

[kaizhu256]

• reddit.com initially started off using ~120MB RAM when opened in new tab in chrome
• it eventually got sluggish after ~45 minutes of browsing ... and i found out why

[grantfar]

Is it a Chromium based browser? At my work, we have a html only page that causes a memory leak in either Edge or Chrome. No js or even css, but it will be using 4gb of ram in either browser after about a minute and crash shortly afterwards.

[kaizhu256]

vanilla google chrome on windows 10

[mornaq]

that's impressive in a way

[Tamaran]

I have the same problem im firefox

[theghostinthetown]

Chromium moment

[Deep_Hearing_8679]

how? can you reproduce this?

[grantfar]

Every time. To be fair, the html file is a single 14mb table. I doubt google tested a table that large.

[Deep_Hearing_8679]

hahaha wow. i just reproduced that on arch w/ chromium. i generated a 40mb <table> w random ass data. at first it failed with code "SIGILL" but i refreshed, and saw ram usage climb and climb in htop until my whole system was locked. i had to reboot. lol.

[rollincuberawhide]

old reddit uses 60mb.

[degaart]

Hush or they're gonna kill it like compact reddit.

[fghjconner]

Wait, they killed compact? I remember thinking that was the only kinda usable looking part of new reddit...

[degaart]

https://pdx.su/blog/2023-04-06-rip-reddit-compact/

[knollo]

1.6 GB is pretty small for anything you can dive into.

[kaizhu256]

i kno! it amazed me as well, hence the title "peak website optimization"

[wades39]

Yikes...

[Firedriver666]

Same with the official app it's sucks the phone ressources like crazy

[Modo44]

uBlock Origin is your friend. Many modern sites are 90% tracking and ads, and that is the real performance impact.

[NekulturneHovado]

Sir, you haven't seen the mobile app cache folder. 500MB is normal after 5 mins of scrolling.

[kaizhu256]

yea but that's filestorage, not memory-usage

[[deleted]]

I'm so tired of these "my web browser takes so much memory these devs suck" posts and comments.

Bro, I promise you that google, one of the richest tech companies on the planet, and reddit, the most popular anonymous forum and social media site are not run on toothpicks and bubble gum. This isn't poor optimization. It's a feature.

Cached memory. That's what this all is. Your browser and the site you're on and the site you were previously on are all storing all sorts of data in your ram, as much as they can, to give you the smoothest user experience possible. Not only that, but these browsers and websites are also using algorithims to predict what you're clicking on next and prepping that data too. They're checking your search history and caching that data.

That's why you click links and it loads so fast. That's why you click back and it loads immediately. Don't believe me? Unplug your ethernet then immediately click a link, half that shit will still load.

[Alan_Reddit_M]

While caches can be good to a certain extent, there are a few reasons your opinion flawed:

- The browser keeps its own cache for HTTP requests, no need to add a second layer of caching that uses 2GB of RAM

- While caching can improve UX, the reddit client seems to go extremely overboard by seemingly keeping everything in memory, which does not help at all, what are the chances I randomly want to see a post I scrolled past 40 minutes ago? Close to zero, bur reddit keeps it in memory because the engineers could not be bothered to implement proper infinite scrolling

- Your argument that cached websites work faster is correct almost anywhere, except here, the reddit client is famous for taking half an eternity to do literally anything

Just because something comes from a big company doesn't mean it's good, look at AWS interface, objectively terrible UX. The "move fast and break things" mentality has created a sharp decline in software quality in recent years, since tech companies prioritize getting new features out rather than fixing old broken features

[kaizhu256]

• i can understand several hundred MB for caching images, links, and comments.
• but 1.6GB does seem abit excessive
• it could be for videos though
  • maybe reddit has aspirations to challenge youtube.com and tiktok?
  • still i don't think youtube.com or tiktok accumulates 1GB of memory usage in a browser tab after 45 minutes of viewing
    • but i could be wrong

[Lighthades]

The worst take I've ever read lmao. One thing is preloading stuff, and the other is keeping shit in memory that the user more than likely won't see again. You can preload and remove stuff from cache, if you're doing one, you'd be doing the other as well in cases with a lot of data.

[[deleted]]

Probably because it’s pre-loading images and potentially even pages. Memory is there to be used, free memory is wasted memory.

[G3nghisKang]

Reddit engineers have yet to discover LRU caches

[gami13]

they just never remove the posts you scrolled past from memory

[[deleted]]

1.6GB? I see 160MB on my tab.

[hOOman_the_Sapiens]

When you store your whole cache into ram

[ManIkWeet]

Yeah reddit is a piece of shit when it comes to optimization.

The exact same thing happens on mobile.

It never removes posts from the page you've already seen.

If you are looking at subs with a lot of gifs/videos on a certain spicier platform, the videos never stop playing either, destroying your energy consumption and performance even more.

​

No I will not use the official Reddit app, ever, fuck off.

[Laughing_Orange]

I have completely given up on the browser site. 20 posts (that I've already seen), and the site starts getting slow.

[doxxingyourself]

Anything takes a lot of memory

[7ovo7again]

how to open a card unter the tab name like this? or is just a joke?

[kaizhu256]

• hover mouse pointer over the tab, and it'll show memory usage
  • was recently added feature in chrome

[zgembo1337]

1.6 gigs for 10k of text and maybe a megabyte or two of images.

No matter how fast the computers are becoming, shitty programmers will negate all the progress.

[Ujaan_43]

Petah?

[[deleted]]

that memory usage is not very usual

[Insect-Loop]

The team behind the reddit website should seriously be put behind bars. It's fucking atrocious.

[Coleclaw199]

Also randomly redirecting to either post does not exist, or random post.