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SternGerlachExperiment

Member

Registered: 2009-10-11

Posts: 51

[SOLVED] Chromium is slow and unresponsive

I've been trying out Chromium for a couple of days because I like some of its features (Vimium, tabs as separate processes).

However, it feels really slow on some occasions, like:

- Google Image search: while Firefox has no trouble browsing the results immediately, Chromium stalls for several seconds before showing the thumbnails and and scrolling the page and is continuously slow

- Opening new tabs: if I open a link in a new background tab, I usually can't scroll the current tab until the new background tab is done loading, or the scrolling is very slow and jerky

I'm running Chromium on quite an old machine (Thinkpad T60 with some early Core Duo processor and 2 GB RAM), so could this be the reason? On the other hand, Firefox works without a hitch most of the time, but sometimes, like after youtube, it has to be restarted or it will eat up serious amounts of CPU power.

Is there anything to be done, or do I just have to switch back to FF? I would really miss Vimium, whereas for example Vimperator is a bit too complicated for my liking.

Last edited by SternGerlachExperiment (2011-09-16 20:23:09)

jakobm

Member

Registered: 2008-03-24

Posts: 132

Re: [SOLVED] Chromium is slow and unresponsive

(It feels) chromium performs better on pages with large and/or many images using --process-per-tab, you can read and try Process Models - The Chromium Projects.

SternGerlachExperiment

Member

Registered: 2009-10-11

Posts: 51

Re: [SOLVED] Chromium is slow and unresponsive

Thanks for your reply.

I tested this quickly with Google Image search. Only "chromium --single-process" works reasonably well. It loads the images immediately and scrolling works immediately. If I use "chromium --process-per-tab" the image search result page becomes slow. The thumbnails are grey for several seconds and it takes even longer for scrolling to work. Even though there is only one tab open.

Edit:

Actually it seems I had two distinct problems:

1) The image search problem was caused by an extension (adblock element hiding helper) + not using the switch --single-process

2) The unresponsive tabs problem was caused by not using --process-per-tab

So, after disabling element hiding helper and starting chromium with the switch --process-per-tab, everything seems to work fine.

Thanks, jakobm!

Last edited by SternGerlachExperiment (2011-09-16 20:24:02)