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Google Chrome is notorious for binge eating all the memory that can get its hands on. And the more tabs you open in it, the hungrier it gets, which raises the question, how many tabs can you open in Google Chrome before everything breaks horribly on a mere mortal system? Turns out not that many. But the system we're using today is no mere mortal. We will be using not one but two AMD epic 9684X CPUs each packing 96 Zen 4 cores and with those we will have 1/2 terb of DDR5 5600 megat transfer per second memory terabytes and listen I know what you're thinking Lionus didn't you do this 6 years ago with 2 terb of memory what's this fraction of a terabyte of memory but the RAM shortage crisis has
impacted did all of us. You guys, if I could get another 512 gigs of RAM, I would do it for you. And besides, our primary bottleneck last time didn't end up being our memory capacity anyway. It was software. So, we've upgraded our operating system. We're going to be using Windows 11. And probably more importantly, we will also be running by popular request on Linux this time using a Python script that will automate Chrome tab opening so we can open Chrome tabs like we've never opened them before. And now I'm going to segue to our sponsor like I've never segueed before with a 316.
War Thunder. Take command of over 2500 different war machines from 10 major nations in one of the most comprehensive vehicle combat games ever made on PC, consoles, and mobile using our link down below. Not going to lie, guys, I'm feeling pretty good. I think we are going to not just beat but absolutely shatter our previous PB of 6,000 Chrome tabs and these CPUs are a huge part of that equation. Last time around we had 64 CPU cores which even today is still a lot of CPU cores. But the thing is not all cores are made equally. Those were Zen 2 which by today's standards is a pretty dated architecture. By contrast, this time, not only are we tripling our core
count to 192 cores, but those cores are Zen 4 with AMD's 3D vcache, meaning that not only are we throwing more cores at the problem, but each of those cores is capable of doing much more work. One of them's already installed, so all we got to do is throw our second CPU in this socket right here. You guys might actually recognize this machine as the same one that broke the world record for calculating digits of pi a little over a year ago. 300 trillionth digit of pi is five. Really? It's done, baby. That was a freaking awesome project. Socket SP5 is actually pretty easy to work with for a server socket. Just one retention screw. Love it. Now, we just need our cooler, which if you're not
familiar with the server world, you might have noticed doesn't have a fan on it. That's totally okay. We just use these plastic air guides and these system fans in order to direct, as you're about to see, a flipping ton of air flow through these fins. Everything will be okay as long as we apply enough thermal compound for this giant IHS that is full of dyes underneath. All right, this torque screwdriver is not quite the same rating as this heat sink, but we'll find out soon enough if that's going to be okay. Time to reinount the CPU. With that out of the way, it's time to talk about RAM. Last
time around, we needed specialized LR dim or load reduced memory in order to reach 2 terb of system memory capacity. But because our newer CPUs have much more modern memory controllers, support for 128 gig dims is just a thing if you can afford the memory sticks. We actually got our hands on these ones a while back for a completely different project before the big shortage. That's why they're a little on the slower side compared to newer DDR5R dims. But I'm really glad that we held on to these because uh if we wanted to replace these today, they're worth a cool $40,000. And that was when we wrote down the notes for this video a few weeks ago, so who knows what they're worth by now. Fun
fact, by the way, one of the reasons that DDR5R dims handle these kinds of high capacities so well are because they split the single 72-bit ECC channel that we used to have into two 40-bit channels. They also integrated power management directly onto the DIM, which working alongside decision feedback equalization helps filter out the exact kind of noise that LR dims were built to address. I just got word that yes, these have actually gone up in price again. Each one of these sticks is about equivalent to an RTX 5090 Astral or a starter car. Okay, then that's insane. Let's go ahead and close this up. Keep that RAM safe and covered.
Let's fire it up. One quick thing that occurred to us is that when it's running, that server is extremely loud. So, if we can avoid sitting right next to it while we're opening up all of our Chrome tabs, that would be amazing. And it turns out we can using active cables. These ones are from Infinite Cables, who, as you guys know, have infinite cables. [clears throat] We can run the server in this corner here behind the set. Did we figure out where we're going to prop it?
Not yet. Cool. How about that table? Yeah, sure. Let's do it. Nice. Perfect. Then we'll have our peripherals right over here. Oh, for display, we're using an optical HDMI cable, also from Infinite Cables. Oh, yeah, buddy. That's performance right there. And that's why we don't want to sit next to it. Now, we play the waiting game. AMD CPUs take a little while to do memory training, and the more memory they have, the more they take. Hey, operating system is loading. Let's go. Now, we just need to see if all the memory shows up. Anytime you get one of those big CPUs out of the socket and back into it, there's a chance that a pin didn't make good contact and one of your memory
channels doesn't work. So, oh man, I'll never get sick of seeing that. Oh no, only 10 memory sticks are showing up. All right, time to remount the CPU. Wonderful. Okay, and we're back. We got 1 and 1/2 TB of RAM showing up, but we did hit a wrinkle. This CPU only runs at 4,800 mega transfers per second. So, we're only going to be way faster than the memory we had last time. Not way, way faster. All right. Now, all we got to do is fire up our Chrome tab tester. This is a handy dandy little script that Michael cooked up. Hello, Linus. It is highly recommended to run this program in incognito mode. Would you like to use incognito mode? Yes.
Yes, I would. I guess I should probably talk about the script a little bit. This is mostly just to eliminate the tedium of manually opening up tabs. It has some monitoring capabilities, but we wanted to keep it lightweight, so it can't really tap any deeper than a query on system resources. So, we're kind of like throwing tabs over a wall and then using system level binoculars via Python to see what happens. As for the tabs it opens, it's got kind of an assortment of sites that would be recognizable by our chronically online audience, including, of course, ltstore.com. Lionus, are you sure it? Yes. No, you don't get to choose. What the Okay, here we go. Create a new Chrome window. Yes.
How many tabs? I don't know. Five. Preparing to blast five tabs. We're going to blast it. That took longer than I would have expected. All right, there's our five tabs. A mix of multimedia and standard imagery. Um, this is awkward. The product we were planning to feature sold out between selecting it and shooting this video. This was a really, really hot product. So, let's go with map of Siberia colle. Oh, man. This was a really good launch, too. The map of Siberia deskpad is still available. Super cute. Full of all kinds of little in jokes and references. Let's do some more tabs. I'm thinking 100. Boom. Oh yeah, there's like Pinterest in there and like Google Oh, goodness gracious.
You've got Google Maps and Google Earth. Are you trying to kill this poor thing? I'm thinking 100. I mean, we're still only looking at 3 4% CPU usage and.1 tab of RAM. Uh, Viewmetrics, last one. Consumed 24 gigs. Oh, dude. Chrome RAM only 26 gigs. We're going to be fine. Okay, we're going to hit it hard this time. 395. I want to get to an even 500. You can hear the fan ramping up. Hey, this is horrifying. Look at it go. It's still doing pretty good, though. Giving tabs a moment to render. And success. Injected 395 tabs. So, let's have a look at our metrics here. Total tabs, 500 in one window.
Many of which terrifyingly are playing video. I can't believe how well this is actually working. By the way, like this is nuts. The system still feels totally responsive. 500 tabs is, by the way, the limit that we have set right now. It's not a Chrome limit, but we found it was the most stable. So now, if we want to go farther, we're going to create a new Chrome window. How many tabs? 500. We're going to a,000, boys. Let's blast some tabs. 600, 700, 800, 900. 1,000 tabs total across two windows using about 128 gigs of memory just on Chrome, which tells me we can go a lot farther. And as you guys saw before, like these
tabs are loaded. Okay, I think we can go faster. We're going to change our chunk size from one tab. Think I could get away with five tabs? Let's try it. Yeah. Okay, we're going to do five tabs per chunk. New Chrome window. 500 more. Let's blast it. Oh, that poor system. You know, it's funny. The CPU is not even working that hard. I guess it's just it's boosting the frequency higher. This must be a fairly lightly threaded workload. Yeah, you can see there's a few little hot spots where individual cores are working pretty hard. As for our memory usage, we're up to 177 casual gigabytes. Total
system use 1,500 tabs. Interesting. Blast 5's memory usage is actually quite a bit lower. And it seems like we might be getting gated by some of the external services we're accessing. Uh-oh. Okay, five might be too much. Maybe we'll change it to three. How's our poor GPU doing here? Our GPU is out of memory. I did not foresee that. We just put a basic GPU in here for video output. Uh-oh. I think it's getting crushed by all this video playback. To lighten things up, we're going to replace those with floatplane.com, which is a video site, but doesn't have any video on the homepage, and spacejam.com, which is a
website from like 1996. It shouldn't be too demanding. Let's have a look at the metrics. We're up to over 200 gigs in use. Let's create a new window. 500 tabs. Here it goes. We're going to do chunks of three this time. Oh, it's starting to be pretty unresponsive. Oh, this is crazy. I can't move my mouse down to the taskbar. That's nuts. What? What is that? Oh, I can cross the threshold now. If I open the start menu with the Windows key, I can move past it. Okay, sure. Twitter is like broken. It would let you send a tweet once it loads. I can't load any pages anymore. Post. I have no idea whose account this is. This is interesting. You can see our newer windows are consuming very little RAM.
What that tells me is that they are not loading properly. Or are they? I guess eliminating Twitch and YouTube made a pretty big difference here. Okay. Did we break LT store? LT store is not loading. Cloudflare blockage. That makes sense. Guards against illegitimate traffic seem to be a little bit more sensitive than the last time we did this. though. I guess if you think about it, that makes sense with all the AI data collection that's going on these days. To help us get gated a little bit less by the services we're trying to access, we've about tripled our URL count here. Let's see if that helps. New Chrome window. Here comes another thousand tabs. Yeah, I'm sure. Oh, this poor
system. This I didn't expect. System memory usage has actually leveled off. Sometimes it goes up a little bit, sometimes it goes down a little bit, but it's not steadily increasing anymore. We just opened another thousand tabs. Oh yeah. See, our thousand tabs apparently is using less RAM than the previous 500 tabs. RAM is creeping up again. Seems like as they're actually loading in content, maybe that will go up. Oh no, she's going. We might just have to be patient. Well, I'm not that patient of a guy. 3,01 tabs. We got to beat the old record here. It crashed. It hard crashed.
Memory usage went from like 300 gigs down to 40. I mean, if we're being real, were we really expecting Windows 11 to beat Windows 10 at anything? Let's change over to Ubuntu. First things first, we're gonna have to raise the limit of open files that we can have. We're going to set it to 65,535. Let's crack it open, shall we? Let's kick things off 500, shall we? Oh, yeah. She's going. Dude, I'm feeling good about this. Wait. Oh, no. YouTube is back in the mix. Oh, that's just to celebrate 500 tabs. Okay. All right.
I'll allow it. Crab rave can run in the background. Everything looks like it's actually working perfectly smoothly, but as we remember, Windows was still doing pretty well at this point, too. We're at about 67 gigs of memory usage, lost another 500. I mean, I see no reason why not to. It's Linux, baby. Already, this is much more promising. We're up to a,000 tabs, and our memory usage is looking way more linear this time. like Windows was opening the tabs, but we all saw what was happening with the memory consumption. Sorry, we opened up too many Chrome tabs. We ran out of resources for lights. Let's blast another 2,000 and then I got to go do a conference call. Good luck, buddy. And we're back after Steam Machine derailed our production on this project.
Let's have a look at how we're doing. Oh, there we go. We've used about 200 gigs of RAM now, meaning we have a long way to go. And while we wait for the next blast to open, let's do another thousand. Let's talk about a funny thing that we observed on Apple when we were trying this out. Michael actually wrote this program on his MacBook, which highlighted one of the ways that Apple thinks different with respect to resource management and monitoring. See, on Mac, as we would approach our system limit, it would actually start to poop out negative numbers for RAM consumption sometimes as we would open more tabs.
It's weird, but it's not quite wrong if you think about Apple's philosophy. Their idea is that if you're not using resources, you're wasting them. So, they will actually pre-cache likely data into system memory even though you haven't necessarily accessed that information. Then what'll happen is that pre-cache will get purged in order to make room for your Chrome tabs leading to a net reduction in overall resource usage. Basically opening up these tabs inspires the OS to jump into spring cleaning mode to make sure that it clears some space for you. Pretty funky, right? Ooh, she's definitely starting to chug a little. One thing I'd like to have a look at is my system resources with respect to RAM right now. So our
GPU is not holding us back. Is this even working? I don't think this is working. Ain't no way my drive activity is at 0% right now. Maybe this will come back to life after this blast is finished. So, I'll use this time to talk about an interesting difference between Linux and Windows. On Linux, everything is a file and that includes monitoring metrics. So, if you look at our code, we opened a file in proc and then simply read it in order to get this Chrome tab tester RAM usage metrics here. But what's funky about that is the proc directory doesn't even exist. It's all virtualized and it's accessible because in Linux everything is a file. On the flip side, Windows doesn't treat hardware info as a
simple text file. Instead, hardware information is objects that are managed by system APIs like WI. So, it'll wait for a more formal query before you're able to check out the goods. Not going to lie, the Windows system seems to have worked better for us, but uh maybe I'll just reopen this. Hey, she's back. Our video memory usage does appear to be climbing. Dude, Michael, are we going to be defeated by VRAM in this economy? We tried to put a bigger graphics card in the server while I was off doing Steam Machine stuff and it just plain wouldn't fit. Although, I think we did put a bigger GPU in this using like a riser at one point.
We tried that too and it wouldn't recognize it. Wouldn't recognize the riser. Maybe it was a different machine then. One thing I'm noticing is that we are definitely actually opening tabs on Linux. Like our usage per tab is not declining the same way that it did on Windows, at least not to quite the same degree. Your mileage may vary, though. We did, of course, switch up the tabs that we're using in order to hopefully alleviate our GPU bottlenecks here. So, if you guys want to try it for yourself, we're going to have this program linked in the video description so you can download it and fire up as many tabs as you want.
Current tab count 4,000. Current memory usage 364 GB, new Chrome window, 1,000 tabs. CPU usage is actually creeping up to something non-negligible now as well, which is crazy to think about when you consider how many flipping cores this is. Obviously, half of these are logical processors, not physical ones. But still, I think my point stands. Interesting. There was a VRAMm drop. Oh, no. What? No. Uh, restore. Damn it, Chrome. We capped out at like 4500 tabs and Chrome crashed. I feel so let down right now. I thought Linux was going to do it, too. What the heck?
Throughout the whole process up until the resources application crashed, the Linux experience was feeling like smoother, like it was better up until when you guys tested it. Did it crash out around here? I got over 6,000 on both Windows and Linux. So, I'm just cursed. To its credit, the system handled the application crash pretty gracefully. She's back up and running again, but viewing the metrics here. Okay, Michael, I don't think your tabs uh metrics are working quite right for total tabs if the application crashes. So, we managed to lose 224 GB of memory on our fifth blast. In all, we
fell short of our record from last time, but that doesn't mean that there's no tech tips to come away with here. One is that it's very clear that websites in general have gotten heavier. And while that wasn't a problem for our overall system resources, which peaked at a little over 300 gigs of memory usage and under 20% of our CPU, it is a problem for browser applications that have to handle these heavier websites. We also learned that if you want to open infinity tabs, your GPU may matter more than you realized with our GPU VRAM maxing out and very likely being a major limiting factor for us today. Another cool tech tip we can take away from this
is that Linux has a trick up its sleeve that we're not using here that could help you out if you don't have a ton of memory. ZRAM, like Windows memory compression, ZRAMM reactively compresses data that's stored in RAM to help it take up less space and to avoid dumping it out to a page file on a much slower SSD. But unlike its Windows counterpart, ZRAMM has much more extensive configurability in terms of the size and even the compression algorithm. It isn't enabled by default in Ubuntu. It's more for entry-level systems with limited RAM. But if you want to get the most out of your memory, that's a rabbit hole that you might want to jump down. Just like you might want to jump down to check out our sponsor,
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