Chromium + Flash + Pandora = very high CPU usage

jlindgren · 2011-04-18 23:23:20

I know Pandora is far from the most efficient software out there, but in Chromium it takes roughly 1.6 GHz of CPU cycles, compared to 260 MHz in Firefox. Same version of Flash (64 bit preview). I was hoping to switch from Firefox to Chromium as it seems to be faster overall, but draining my laptop's battery like this is a show-stopper.

chromium 10.0.648.205-1
xorg-server 1.10.1-1
xf86-video-ati 6.14.1-1

Firefox 4.0 (64-bit) from upstream
Adobe Flash 10.3 d162 (64-bit preview)

With Chromium:

Cn                Avg residency       P-states (frequencies)
C0 (cpu running)        (45.4%)         2.00 Ghz   100.0%
polling           0.4ms ( 0.1%)         1.60 Ghz     0.0%
C1 mwait          0.2ms (26.9%)         1200 Mhz     0.0%
C4 mwait          0.2ms (27.6%)

Top causes for wakeups:
  65.4% (1557.0)   [radeon] <interrupt>
  12.5% (297.2)   [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
  12.4% (295.4)   kworker/0:0

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 3609 john      20   0  455m 131m  20m S  50.2  3.3   1:40.29 chromium
 3151 root      20   0  115m  32m  15m R  30.6  0.8   1:06.56 X

With Firefox:

Cn                Avg residency       P-states (frequencies)
C0 (cpu running)        (19.6%)         2.00 Ghz     0.0%
polling           2.3ms ( 0.0%)         1.60 Ghz     0.0%
C1 mwait          0.7ms ( 5.9%)         1200 Mhz   100.0%
C4 mwait          1.0ms (74.4%)

Top causes for wakeups:
  29.8% (192.6)   [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
  26.3% (170.1)   kworker/0:0
  15.6% (100.8)   firefox-bin

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 3860 john      20   0  709m 220m  37m S  22.0  5.6   0:29.94 firefox-bin
 3151 root      20   0  110m  25m 8472 S   1.7  0.6   1:55.23 X

Last edited by jlindgren (2011-04-18 23:25:06)

the sad clown · 2011-04-18 23:34:34

do you have plugins in firefox that might prevent the page from loading things that are being loaded in Chromium?

jlindgren · 2011-04-18 23:44:41

I had ad blockers enabled in both browsers. Disabling these made no difference. (Video ads are not in the question here, if that's what you were aiming at; they are blocked by a proxy server.)

the sad clown · 2011-04-19 01:09:26

I'll test them out when I get home. I haven't noticed it before, but I don't often go to pandora on my computer. Have you noticed similar behavior at any other websites?

jlindgren · 2011-04-19 01:22:57

It seems to be only Pandora. Just tried playing a 360p YouTube video in both Chromium and Firefox; the CPU usage was about equal.

jlindgren · 2011-04-19 01:26:49

The almost exact 100 wakeups per second makes me wonder if Pandora tries to redraw constantly but gets throttled to 100 FPS in Firefox.

Edit: Okay, I guess I should have done a little more research before posting here; seems to be a known problem with Pandora and Chromium (on Windows and Mac also (!)):
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issue … l?id=38794
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issue … l?id=77691
http://superuser.com/questions/149230/w … -cpu-usage
http://hintsforums.macworld.com/showthread.php?p=617863

Last edited by jlindgren (2011-04-19 01:42:57)

the sad clown · 2011-04-19 01:59:04

Interesting. Thanks for the research and links.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-04-18 23:23:20

Chromium + Flash + Pandora = very high CPU usage

#2 2011-04-18 23:34:34

Re: Chromium + Flash + Pandora = very high CPU usage

#3 2011-04-18 23:44:41

Re: Chromium + Flash + Pandora = very high CPU usage

#4 2011-04-19 01:09:26

Re: Chromium + Flash + Pandora = very high CPU usage

#5 2011-04-19 01:22:57

Re: Chromium + Flash + Pandora = very high CPU usage

#6 2011-04-19 01:26:49

Re: Chromium + Flash + Pandora = very high CPU usage

#7 2011-04-19 01:59:04

Re: Chromium + Flash + Pandora = very high CPU usage

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