How many can you open?

[danjmilos]

I was just messing around in Opera deleting some old sites and generally organizing my Bookmarks when I noticed " Open All Folder Items" before the listing of all the items, so on a whim I clicked it. A message pops up "You are about to open 21 tabs do you want to continue" thought why not. 40 seconds later 20 of the 21 were loaded and ready for browsing a few were to pages on the same site with there being 16 different sites loaded. IE does not have this feature what about one of the other browsers?

So how many can you open?

Dan

[Jojoyee]

Chrome has "Open all bookmarks" and does the same.

How many can you open? Well, I'd ask how much Ram you have.

[danjmilos]

Jojoyee,

I have 2.5 on an XP P4 3.1 processor.

Dan

[Ritho]

Firefox has that feature too. If you right click a bookmark folder you have the choice to "open all in tabs."

Seeing how many tabs I could have open at once sounded interesting so...

System Specs:
OS: Linux Mint 8
Memory: 4GB
Processor: AMD Phenom 9850 Quad-Core
Browser: Firefox 3.6

I got 104 unique sites to open without system instability. Firefox was only using around 700MB of ram. I could have probably gotten a few more tabs to open, but with each successive tab I opened I was taking longer and longer to open. So RAM was not the problem, but my processor was maxing out. Each core was jumping between 10% to 100% usage in succession so the graph for the cpu looked like the Himalayas.

I am sure if you were to open fairly innocuous webpages, without any dynamic content or such, you could get a lot more to load than those pages with lots of flash banners or other jazz.

I was fairly pleased with the performance of Firefox 3.6. I don't think 3.5 would have performed nearly as well. I imagine I would not get anywhere near 104 in Windows, with amongst other things Firefox's memory leaks.

An interesting outcome of this was that I clicked Firefox's option to close all the tabs but one, and the browser crashed after closing about half. Then when I restarted Firefox, it referenced its cache and began to reopen all 104 tabs again!

[Jojoyee]

Originally Posted by Ritho

Firefox was only using around 700MB of ram. I could have probably gotten a few more tabs to open, but with each successive tab I opened I was taking longer and longer to open. So RAM was not the problem, but my processor was maxing out. Each core was jumping between 10% to 100% usage in succession so the graph for the cpu looked like the Himalayas.

4GB memory should be much more than enough, I'm using about 2GB. You're right that processor is a key factor too. If you're using SSD Ram Drive instead of the hard disk drive, I suppose that would help too.

Danjmilos, a P4 processor is probably considered quite slow now if we compare it with Q-core that Ritho is using. I'm only using AMD D-core

[Ritho]

I don't think 3.5 would have performed nearly as well. I imagine I would not get anywhere near 104 in Windows, with amongst other things Firefox's memory leaks.

Well I stuck my foot in my mouth. My apologies to Windows XP! 379 tabs open. RAM in use by Firefox was over 1200MB Paging file at around 950 MB. The CPU performed much better under Windows at an average of only 25%. That got me to wondering about the quality of drivers or support for the quad core on Linux.

I loaded all my bookmarks 182 for unique sites, then needed more pages so I loaded all the 197 pages from our RSS feed. (That should boost our traffic a bit around here ) I think I could have loaded a lot more, but was running out of bookmarks. I also have FF3.6 on Windows, and I looked like the memory was leaking a bit so I don't know how long the system would have remained stable had I left it sit for a while. I was impressed though.

[danjmilos]

Got home from work a little bit ago, going out for fish. Wanted to see how many more I could open so I started with a folder of 16, then added 22, then 26 more I waited for each folder to open before adding more. Kept an eye on task manager watching what was going on after the first 2 groups cpu stabilized around 8%. Then loaded the last group after 5 minutes some sites still had not loaded page file and ram were doing fine but the cpu was spiking into the 75-80% range needed maybe 10 more to finishing to have all loaded when I had a 90% spike and that was enough for me so I started closing tabs. It was fun while it lasted but I probably will not do that again.

Dan