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Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

blog.strml.net

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Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#21

Post by disiplus »

dumbmatter wrote: post #4

What are we supposed to do about stuff this? Like I wrote a video game https://play.basketball-gm.com/ that lets you open multiple tabs for viewing multiple screens even while simulation is occurring in another tab. But Chrome recently stopped running the simulation if it's in a background tab. Putting my simulation code in a Shared Worker would be nice, except Safari and IE will never support it and it seems likely…

chrome regulary breaks something, so we run tested versions of chrome for our internal webapp and block chrome updates.

but chrome does not like that and is always nagging and trying to trick you into installing the latest versions.

i looks like we will have to package it as electron app.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#22

Post by valarauca1 »

tambourine_man wrote: post #14
overcast wrote: post #5

Can we aggressively throttle memory usage? Why does it require 300-500MB of ram PER TAB?

It probably doesn't. Measuring memory usage is hard on a modern OS. I'd guess there's a lot of shared memory between tabs

    Measuring memory usage is hard on a modern OS.
Not in the slightest. OS's have to allocate virtual memory to each process or that process with SIG-FAULT when it touches invalid memory.

Tracking per-process memory usage is one of the most trivial things OS/Pref tools do.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#24

Post by mikeash »

valarauca1 wrote: post #22
tambourine_man wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably doesn't. Measuring memory usage is hard on a modern OS. I'd guess there's a lot of shared memory between tabs

Measuring memory usage is hard on a modern OS. Not in the slightest. OS's have to allocate virtual memory to each process or that process with SIG-FAULT when it touches invalid memory. Tracking per-process memory usage is one of the most trivial things OS/Pref tools do.

Measuring it is easy. Defining it is what's hard. If three processes each have the same 10MB executable mapped into memory, plus 10MB of heap data, how much memory is each process using? There's no easy answer to that question.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#25

Post by brandon272 »

overcast wrote: post #5

Can we aggressively throttle memory usage? Why does it require 300-500MB of ram PER TAB?

Does Chrome only use RAM if it thinks it is available? (i.e. if it starts detecting that other process are running and eating up RAM, will it use less?)

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#26

Post by vdnkh »

This is going to destroy HLS playback in a background tab. Playing back HLS with JS is already a very cpu intensive, time-dependent process and we've already struggled with the current background tab throttling - a delay like this will all but kill playback or make it stutter to the point you'll wish it's dead instead. I commend Chrome for driving web standards but they've been a huge bully recently.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#29

Post by ben_jones »

dumbmatter wrote: post #4

What are we supposed to do about stuff this? Like I wrote a video game https://play.basketball-gm.com/ that lets you open multiple tabs for viewing multiple screens even while simulation is occurring in another tab. But Chrome recently stopped running the simulation if it's in a background tab. Putting my simulation code in a Shared Worker would be nice, except Safari and IE will never support it and it seems likely…

Could you create a tabbed interface that is just a dumb view of a server state communicated over websockets? Then the user could just open the page in n windows (each on its own tab) and have the same state represented in each?

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#30

Post by Analog24 »

mcescalante wrote: post #8

It's awesome to see Chrome trying to improve performance for people with many tabs open, which is many of us. I use a LOT of tabs, and the best plugin has been The Great Suspender. Highly recommend it for anyone who wants memory & CPU back and keeps many tabs/windows open at once: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

Seconded. Chrome used to crash ~1/month on me but ever since I started using The Great Suspender I haven't had a single incident and it's been well over a year.
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