alt Hacker NewsLinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs
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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).
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
That's peanuts. LI's third-party bot prevention service, "protechts.net", took 42 GB RAM on my laptop with 32 GB the other day. Obviously found out because it got suspiciously slow and wheezing, and Firefox swapping like crazy seemed to be the culprit. Looking at its performance, this scare jump happened: [1].
I have to say I haven't spotted anything at this brutality scale neither before, not after this incident. Also, I had no third-party adblocking software deployed, just Firefox's native defaults. (I use quite a few other extensions, userscripts and userstyles, though, so I cannot rule out some clash induced by them.)
I see LI is using protechts.net stuff in hidden iframes with charming id="humanThirdPartyIframe" and even nicer id="humanSecurityEnforcerIframe". Lovely!
You can actually permanently reclaim that memory and prevent this bug in the future!
Just close the tabs and never open LinkedIn again.
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?
The fact that they hijack scrolling to artificially limit scroll speed is insane to me. Feels like I'm trying to navigate through molasses
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.
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 wonder how much of that is from Linkedin checking what browser extensions you have, probably desperately trying to prevent screen scraping?
This is the part about the "wasm won't replace JavaScript" argument I see being slept on and why I am so disheartened about how practically no progress has been made on it.
Most trivial apps don't need to be optimized, and for them, JavaScript is fine.
But for complex interactive web applications - it really fuggin matters.
Think; - vscode
- jira
There's no reason these applications should be slow, single threaded, and consume gigabytes of memory - but that's a limitation of the technology.
I know first hand that Atlassian has spent millions of dollars building bundlers in different forms just to save a few milliseconds of load time.
Just let me write the front end in Rust and if the browser detects that no JavaScript is running - don't start a JavaScript engine.
While you're at it, improve the SharedWorker story so I can effectively share data between tabs (enables cross tab sync, great for chat apps and local caching). I recently tried to make an offline-only application with a wasm-based sqlite implementation in a SharedWorker and the API just doesn't work.
I remember touring a chemistry lab in college and one student asked the panel of chemists how much LinkedIn mattered in their industry and they paused until one chemist asks “what is LinkedIn?”
I wish someone would build a LinkedIn that was actually good. That you could actually do business over, and no I don't mean spam people with you BS cold emails which must have a 10000:1 success rate. I wrote a bit about this almost a decade ago and there is nothing.[1]
All the data harvesting requires a lot of resources.
LinkedIn in 2026 means a social media full of slope AI posts where folks interact with it without noticing it.
Relationship posts, and even OF alike posts that you only see on Instagram/X
Linkedin is not longer a platform focused into work and networking.
In a RAM starved world — LinkedIn deserves fewer users. In fact, no users. This service is sadly one of the most useless things out there, right next to Facebook.
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!
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?
Cloudflare has the same issue with their new horrible dashboard, 2.1 GB across ONE tab.
Web developers of HN: how is this possible? What can use 1.2GB RAM for a website? Preloaded all videos?
Always thought people should be organizing cross industry unions and planning strikes on the platform.
Why not?
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?
The performance of both the website and the iOS app is also not great. On the iOS app, I frequently see frames dropped and scrolling is sometimes blocked for up to a second or more at a time.
LinkedIn's feed is certainly not simple, but modern iPhones should be more than capable of rendering it at 60fps.
Add the fact that dark reader bricks the website, I'm surprised it's not eating even more RAM.
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
It's not just memory. I've never been able to scroll back more than about 6 days in the LinkedIn feed. I slows to a crawl and this was on a gaming machine with 64GB of ram. I tried raising all the limits in the browser with only marginal gains. If they had an option to instead use pagination with say 100 items per page I think it might get a little better.
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.
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.
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
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.
Don’t go on that god forsaken hellhole of a dead internet website. Problem solved.
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.
Notably mentions should be given to Stripe (dashboard) at ~900 MB and Youtube.com at ~1 GB on watch pages.
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.
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.
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
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.
That’s nothing. I’ve seen the Azure portal using >5gb in a single chrome tab.
This isn't all that accurate. Unless Chrome only presents the private working set, this will include shared or sharable memory.
I wonder how we might avoid this. It seems like often on this site we talk about matters of taste: like examples of good and bad systems. I wonder if there's a book focused on developing taste as an engineer, designer, etc in systems.
I've noticed that most books on software engineering are overly academic or focus too much on process. I feel like if you wanted to avoid something like the LinkedIn example you would need to make a meme book that was so simple, pervasive, and widely known that it could even reach an executive (for them to know whether or not work was actually good.)
That is probably like ... naive of me to say though.
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.
uBlock Origin -> My Filters:
www.linkedin.com##div[data-testid="mainFeed"]:matches-path(/feed)Its owned by Microsoft. They sell RAM.
Closed mine ages ago, along with most of my social media. No need for it, never was a need for it.
Are they affiliated with RAM sellers?
What browser?
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).
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
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