[Zotero 7 Beta] Configure higher number of simultaneously loaded tabs

mjthoraval

I observe that I can only have a maximum of 5 PDF tabs loaded at a certain time. Then they get unloaded, and I need to load them again when I come back to them. This makes the navigation between tabs very slow, as I usually scan through 10 to 20 PDFs simultaneously when working on a topic.

If I open 20 PDF tabs in separate windows, I reach a RAM usage of 6 to 7 Go. With a 32 Go RAM, this is working perfectly fine.
On my office workstation with 256 Go RAM, I could easily go up to 50 Go usage of RAM to navigate quickly between a much larger number of PDFs if needed.

Is it possible to set the maximum number of tabs opened simultaneously? This will make the tabs navigation much faster.
I can do that at the moment using separate windows, but it would be nice to do it also in tabs.

Zotero 7.0.0-beta.68+c31a40c74 (64-bit)
Window 10

dstillman

There's a pull request for this, but I think we can just do a better job of handling this automatically.

mjthoraval

Thank you.
In Firefox, I am using the extension Auto Tab Discard (also in Chrome), which has extensive options to better handle the RAM. Otherwise Firefox quickly saturates the RAM, making the laptop burning hot. I should arguably clean up the unused tabs, but the plugin is doing a good job at keeping a compromise of responsiveness and RAM usage, without having to worry about it after tuning the options.

The main options I am using are:
- Time delay for unloading
- Condition on number of tabs opened

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u265723/qtnkh0ntrqltv4htb8cm.png

And:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u265723/qpatquj6fdvw6xge2jkq.png

But I will be happy to test other strategies, if it can automatically adapt to different hardware.

dstillman

Otherwise Firefox quickly saturates the RAM, making the laptop burning hot

I doubt that's related to RAM. That just sounds like CPU usage in background tabs from running scripts, videos, ads, etc. That wouldn't be an issue in Zotero.

(I have literally thousands of tabs open in Firefox and have always been satisfied with its default behavior — it's one of the reason I always preferred it to Chrome (though I guess Chrome finally gained automatic tab unloading last year) — but its automated tab unloading does seem to be focused on memory, not CPU. So if you have a ton of RAM and have somewhat recently accessed some badly behaved tabs, I guess those could stay open and impact performance/heat. But something approximating what Firefox does should be sufficient for our purposes.)