Feature request: free memory of unused workspaces
 

I noticed that OmniWeb always starts up with a nice and low memory footprint. However once I've cycled through all tabs in all workspaces (that's what I usually do in the morning) memory usage increases depending on how many pages I have open across all workspaces.

The problem is that once the program has grabbed all that memory it never releases it again unless I close tabs (which is what I don't want, that's what the workspaces are for, aren't they?).

Why not allow it to automatically release memory for workspaces which haven't been in the foreground for a while? I would even sacrifice some runtime performance in allowing it to release memory as soon as I switch workspaces. That would make OmniWeb probably the leanest tabbed browser on earth.

Think about it!

If I remember correctly, we hang onto those pages in case you decide to switch back to the workspace, but after an hour (?) the memory gets released.

[QUOTE=Brian;104637]If I remember correctly, we hang onto those pages in case you decide to switch back to the workspace, but after an hour (?) the memory gets released.[/QUOTE]
That's interesting. I need to check memory usage when I come back from my lunch break. My impression is that once I've got a memory usage of about 1.4 GB, it will never drop again.

[QUOTE=mbert;104656]That's interesting. I need to check memory usage when I come back from my lunch break. My impression is that once I've got a memory usage of about 1.4 GB, it will never drop again.[/QUOTE]

OK, tried it. It was down from 1.4 GB to 800 MB. Maybe I wasn't away for an hour, so that some pieces have not been freed. Thus - it seems to work.

But I must admit, I find one hour a bit too long, in particular since I have so many tabs distributed over my workspaces. In an ideal world, I'd like to have this configurable, else a lower timeout, maybe 30min?

[QUOTE=mbert;104658]But I must admit, I find one hour a bit too long, in particular since I have so many tabs distributed over my workspaces. In an ideal world, I'd like to have this configurable, else a lower timeout, maybe 30min?[/QUOTE]

Sure, you can do that! We've provided a [URL="http://www.omnigroup.com/Documentation/OmniWeb/DefaultsList-5.0.html#WorkspaceExpireTime"]WorkspaceExpireTime[/URL] hidden preference setting (documented on the linked page along with many many other settings), which indicates how long (in seconds) a workspace can remain unused before its resources are reclaimed.

To set your workspaces to expire every 30 minutes, enter this command in a Terminal window and restart OmniWeb:

[CODE]defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniWeb5 WorkspaceExpireTime 1800[/CODE]

Hope this helps!

There's no way to change those values for a running copy of OmniWeb, is there? Alternatively, being able to specify the WorkspacesExpire property on a workspace-by-workspace basis would be handy. Much of the need would evaporate if you'd just ship that 64-bit version, however :-)

[QUOTE=Ken Case;104664]
Hope this helps![/QUOTE]

Thank you VERY MUCH! That's great!

I now have set the workspace expiry time to 5 minutes. That's perfect for the way I use the browser - in far the most cases when I switch workspaces I want a full reload of the workspace, that's why I have distributed my tabs over several workspaces in the first place. The browser has now a modest memory footprint for most of the time - about 600MB with more than 40 tabs overall, that's not bad!

Only one thing bothers me more than before - I have more crashes "out of nothing". That might indicate that the reason for these crashes has to do with freeing memory of unused workspaces. That might be a hint for bugfixing :)