The juxtaposition between this and "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder" is probably the best one I've seen in a long time
show comments
eximius
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).
show comments
gnarlouse
You can actually permanently reclaim that memory and prevent this bug in the future!
Just close the tabs and never open LinkedIn again.
lucb1e
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
show comments
torginus
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.
kace91
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?
show comments
alyandon
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.
show comments
noitpmeder
The fact that they hijack scrolling to artificially limit scroll speed is insane to me. Feels like I'm trying to navigate through molasses
show comments
eclipticplane
I wonder how much of that is from Linkedin checking what browser extensions you have, probably desperately trying to prevent screen scraping?
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.
show comments
namegulf
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.
bvan
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?
show comments
neeeeeeal
Is it not possible to collar the amount of RAM a browser tab is able to use? If not, would love for someone to develop this!
aquir
Web developers of HN: how is this possible? What can use 1.2GB RAM for a website? Preloaded all videos?
show comments
dijit
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?
kristopolous
Always thought people should be organizing cross industry unions and planning strikes on the platform.
Why not?
show comments
barbegal
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.
show comments
ianberdin
Are they affiliated with RAM sellers?
dzonga
for jobs - indeed is better or other small avenues in their heyday such as HN who is hiring (all my jobs have come through hn)
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
show comments
SlightlyLeftPad
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.
gitmwnkdkc
That’s nothing. I’ve seen the Azure portal using >5gb in a single chrome tab.
enesozt
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
astrospective
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.
inetknght
It also constantly uses about 50% of my CPU.
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.
rollulus
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.
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.
jrm4
I know I'm old, but I now find LinkedIn to be my favorite social media site, and I'll explain why.
Skin in the game. Yes, it's full of fluffy sounding things, but with a little patience and reading between lines, it's extremely valuable and here's why:
Overwhelmingly most of the time -- when someone posts anything there -- it has the potential to directly quickly improve, or more importantly destroy, their own LIVELIHOOD. It feels like the opposite, but making the choice to post there is a huge risk.
Now, that might come with fluff, of course -- but in a way you could reasonably argue it is the REALEST social media site of them all.
show comments
throwatdem12311
Don’t go on that god forsaken hellhole of a dead internet website. Problem solved.
p_ing
This isn't all that accurate. Unless Chrome only presents the private working set, this will include shared or sharable memory.
system2
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?
CrzyLngPwd
Closed mine ages ago, along with most of my social media. No need for it, never was a need for it.
gamblor956
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.
Not only it's huge and slow, but the design is broken (some elements frequently masking others, like the top banner masking half the top menu, or the icons masking the search box), and it's full of errors.
I had to use it this very morning (yes, that's a new low) and met two errors in two pages. Asked Claude about those bugs, and it made fun of me because they were well known bugs. Even for AIs LinkedIn website is slop apparently.
This HN post to collectively vent some frustration comes in a timely fashion.
(For the record: the first bug was "another admin is already editing this page" making it impossible to edit a business page translations, and the next one was wrong people count when associating personnal profiles to business ones).
examachine
what a useless junk indeed.... terrible code
steveharing1
For sure there is more to what they just show
user070223
Github hogging cpu when js is turned off
fredgrott
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
show comments
cmiles8
Beyond being useful for a quick check on someone’s career history, LinkedIn is mostly full of grifters pretending to be experts in things while the actual experts never post about the subject on LinkedIn.
delduca
LinkedIn is full of crap. Unfortunately is the only way to get recruiters visibility.
thebeardredis
And? Who uses (is used by) Linkedin?
arun6582
linkedin is shit. i will get negative karma again
show comments
davisr
[flagged]
dave333
Now I'm retired, linkedin's daily games are a fun way to do a little brain tai chi. Queens https://www.linkedin.com/games/queens/ is my favorite, although my solve time is consistently about twice the average apparently.
show comments
cuevaio
whatttt
z3ratul163071
well it is a microslop product, what do you expect?
b8
So I pay for Global Entry only to have to play for Clear for faster screening. Now I have to pay another fee for a different service to get thru it faster AGAIN. I'm tired of the pay to win situation.
The juxtaposition between this and "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder" is probably the best one I've seen in a long time
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).
You can actually permanently reclaim that memory and prevent this bug in the future!
Just close the tabs and never open LinkedIn again.
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
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 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?
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.
The fact that they hijack scrolling to artificially limit scroll speed is insane to me. Feels like I'm trying to navigate through molasses
I wonder how much of that is from Linkedin checking what browser extensions you have, probably desperately trying to prevent screen scraping?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46904361
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.
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.
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?
Is it not possible to collar the amount of RAM a browser tab is able to use? If not, would love for someone to develop this!
Web developers of HN: how is this possible? What can use 1.2GB RAM for a website? Preloaded all videos?
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?
Always thought people should be organizing cross industry unions and planning strikes on the platform.
Why not?
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.
Are they affiliated with RAM sellers?
for jobs - indeed is better or other small avenues in their heyday such as HN who is hiring (all my jobs have come through hn)
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 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.
That’s nothing. I’ve seen the Azure portal using >5gb in a single chrome tab.
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
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.
It also constantly uses about 50% of my CPU.
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.
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.
Not for me even if I completetly turn off uBlock https://files.catbox.moe/5a3bcq.png
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.
I know I'm old, but I now find LinkedIn to be my favorite social media site, and I'll explain why.
Skin in the game. Yes, it's full of fluffy sounding things, but with a little patience and reading between lines, it's extremely valuable and here's why:
Overwhelmingly most of the time -- when someone posts anything there -- it has the potential to directly quickly improve, or more importantly destroy, their own LIVELIHOOD. It feels like the opposite, but making the choice to post there is a huge risk.
Now, that might come with fluff, of course -- but in a way you could reasonably argue it is the REALEST social media site of them all.
Don’t go on that god forsaken hellhole of a dead internet website. Problem solved.
This isn't all that accurate. Unless Chrome only presents the private working set, this will include shared or sharable memory.
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?
Closed mine ages ago, along with most of my social media. No need for it, never was a need for it.
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.
uBlock Origin -> My Filters:
Not only it's huge and slow, but the design is broken (some elements frequently masking others, like the top banner masking half the top menu, or the icons masking the search box), and it's full of errors.
I had to use it this very morning (yes, that's a new low) and met two errors in two pages. Asked Claude about those bugs, and it made fun of me because they were well known bugs. Even for AIs LinkedIn website is slop apparently.
This HN post to collectively vent some frustration comes in a timely fashion.
(For the record: the first bug was "another admin is already editing this page" making it impossible to edit a business page translations, and the next one was wrong people count when associating personnal profiles to business ones).
what a useless junk indeed.... terrible code
For sure there is more to what they just show
Github hogging cpu when js is turned off
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
Beyond being useful for a quick check on someone’s career history, LinkedIn is mostly full of grifters pretending to be experts in things while the actual experts never post about the subject on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is full of crap. Unfortunately is the only way to get recruiters visibility.
And? Who uses (is used by) Linkedin?
linkedin is shit. i will get negative karma again
[flagged]
Now I'm retired, linkedin's daily games are a fun way to do a little brain tai chi. Queens https://www.linkedin.com/games/queens/ is my favorite, although my solve time is consistently about twice the average apparently.
whatttt
well it is a microslop product, what do you expect?
So I pay for Global Entry only to have to play for Clear for faster screening. Now I have to pay another fee for a different service to get thru it faster AGAIN. I'm tired of the pay to win situation.