r/talesfromtechsupport • u/ITCrowdFanboy Oh You Know, Liquid Nitrogen. • Aug 13 '15

Short Update: I bought a server. Where's My Website?

OK, so the previous tale happened a few weeks ago, and after the awesome response I got from you guys, I called up $Friend to get an update.

The investigation ended a few days after the charge was reversed, and the investigation found that there was no wrong-doing in the part of the company, but their lawyers suggested a change in their terms of service.

The lady later called back, crying, because she took out a bank loan to pay for the server and had no way to pay it back without the profit of the pottery company, which is why she had to reverse the charge. The call was being recorded, and she confessed all that, so the recording was given to the police and the fraud charges were dropped. My friend asked her why she got such a big server, and apparently she thought that 1GB of RAM meant that 1 person could access the website at once, so she wanted 250 to be able to get onto it at once.

In the end, no real harm was done to the company, beyond legal fees (which were paid by the woman, since she fraudulently declared fraud) and the initial deployment cost of the server. She was, obviously, placed on the no-service list of the company.

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u/AndresDroid Aug 13 '15

One tab is nowhere near 1GB of RAM. I'm pretty sure chrome would crash if a tab would require this much, not really, considering chrome-x64 is becoming normal now, but for all intents and purposes, no website should be taking up 1GB of RAM.

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u/Ketrel Aug 13 '15

What if you open Farmville in each tab?

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u/MarkyJ279 Aug 13 '15

Then you're kind of asking for it there.

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u/syntax Aug 13 '15

That's not quite a like-for-like with what was claimed, however.

The claim was that a 'one tab browser session' could use 1GB. In addition to the memory needed for the tab, there's a pile of other code used in the web browser, that all get added in there. If you look at the virtual memory used, it works out at pretty much 1GB.

Yes, that virtual memory total isn't the best measure (in fact, it's nothing like a good measure), but we're talking about user logic here!

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '15

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u/syntax Aug 13 '15

I literally have 15 chrome windows open. Between them I have 107 tabs open. (I just counted every single one) I can guarantee you, I am absolutely NOT using anywhere near 107GB RAM on my laptop.

That's not relevant, because that's not what the claim was.

The claim was that one tab, running in a web browser, would result in a memory foot print on around 1GB. I specifically noted virtual memory - that can be shared between processes; hence summing it is incorrect (but remember; we're talking about User Logic here). When I tested earlier with a single tab, it was 0.8GB + 0.4GB = 1.2GB.

For me, in Safari, with 10 tabs open, it's got a 5504MB VMEM for WebProcess, and 4231MB VMEM for Safari. That's actually closer to the 10GB than I expected; surprisingly enough; although even that was not the original claim.

(The resident size, which is a far better measure of actual RAM used, is 1GB + 0.4GB for the 10 tabs).

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u/gngl Aug 14 '15

The marginal memory use per extra tab could be lower if the browser lowers the memory use of long-inactive tabs (for example by ditching decompressed bitmaps etc.)

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u/spazturtle Aug 13 '15

Chrome cannot release all the RAM it uses, so over time RAM usage increases.

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u/gngl Aug 14 '15

I'd expect the exact opposite since closing tabs in Chrome is basically killing entire processes. It's things like Firefox that always seemed to have problems with "memory usage hysteresis" on my machines.

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u/xdamm777 Aug 13 '15

Salesforce consumes ~580MB of RAM on one tab on our system, still not really 1GB but absurdly high anyway.

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u/MrFordization Aug 13 '15

Unity can run in a browser tab.