Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#181

Post by Ajedi32 » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:52 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #20

I like the change as a general idea but there obviously needs to be a manual override. Like, I don't want websites to access my camera without permission but obviously I want to allow some websites to do that. A similar permission could be used here and is perfectly backwards compatible: 1. a tab exceeds its quota and throttling kicks in; 2. you visit the tab to check why it stopped working; 3. you get a permission p…

Seems like the current solution they're advocating for is for sites to do background processing in a [Worker][1].

This seems like a step towards the way things work with mobile apps currently, where the app's main thread gets suspended when its not in the foreground, and background processing happens in separate threads which the user has some degree of control over.

Edit: I meant regular `Worker`s, not `ServiceWorker`s.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Worker

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#182

Post by dingo_bat » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:52 PM UTC

Why though? I run Chrome on my decently powered laptop and most of the time I am connected to AC power. I want the machine to run as close to full potential as possible. This is not a mobile phone that needs to preserve battery by killing every background process. It's frustrating because no other browser matches chrome in smoothness and bug-free-ness, so I have no option but to tolerate the trademark anti-user behavior from google.

Firefox y u sux so much?

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#183

Post by luhn » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:53 PM UTC

blauditore wrote: post #110

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...

I meet many tab hoarders (always open a new one, never close any, ending up with hundrets), but just can't wrap my head around it! I hate having more than 6-7 simultaneously open because it gets increasingly harder to keep an overview of what you're doing. The same applies for IDE tabs or windows. Too much of them and finding the right one becomes increasingly hard, and losing the thread more likely.

I tend to lean towards tab hoarding. I use Tab Corral to automatically close out old tabs, which works out pretty well. Rather than having to evaluate whether I still need a certain tab up, it quietly closes it after a bit, usually once I've forgotten about it.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#184

Post by humblebee » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:54 PM UTC

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...

Is there anything that does the opposite of this? A lot of our current tests run in a browser window, and generally I leave it in the background as I don't want to stare at my tests running. However, when they are backgrounded they slow down and sometimes fail due to timeouts. I haven't actually tried, but does opening a new window get around this even if it does not have focus?

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#185

Post by redthrowaway » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:54 PM UTC

blauditore wrote: post #110

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...

I meet many tab hoarders (always open a new one, never close any, ending up with hundrets), but just can't wrap my head around it! I hate having more than 6-7 simultaneously open because it gets increasingly harder to keep an overview of what you're doing. The same applies for IDE tabs or windows. Too much of them and finding the right one becomes increasingly hard, and losing the thread more likely.

Tabs are a todo list. I've currently got two pinned tabs open, JIRA and bitbucket tabs that act as placeholders, one unfinished email, one spotify playlist for work, one podcast, and 6 articles to read. And that's only because I recently restarted Chrome. I can easily have 20+ tabs open if Chrome has been running for a week or two.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#186

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:55 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#187

Post by mjburgess » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:56 PM UTC

altimin wrote: post #176

Hi, this is Alexander. I'm an engineer on Chromium team working on scheduling and on background tab throttling in particular. Firstly, I want to make clear that we are not shipping this in Chrome 56. We have enabled throttling as an experiment in beta channel to measure impact and collect feedback from web devs. We will aim to ship it in Chrome 57, subject to further feedback. In response to concerns voiced we will d…

Pinning a tab should disable throttling. Gives user straightforward control over which tabs are important.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#188

Post by kilroy123 » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 5:59 PM UTC

redthrowaway wrote: post #179

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...

Unfortunately, I find a lot of sites don't play nice with The Great Suspender. Lots of js-heavy sites would break when they were "resumed", resulting in my place in an article/podcast/video/etc being lost. I'm glad Google is addressing the issue; hopefully they'll do so in a way that's more transparent to the user.

Just white-list those sites.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#189

Post by euyyn » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 6:00 PM UTC

dumbmatter wrote: post #70

dchuk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? I mean, you have to admit what you built is the epitome of edge case when it comes to how a browser is typically used, and is actually exactly the type of thing they want to optimize because basically if you aren't looking at the tab, it's not being used (generally). Maybe use electron or something?

I don't think that replacing a traditional desktop app with a web app is an edge case. That's one of the main points of HTML5.

The way you architected it is uncommon, though. For example, with GMail, that you mentioned as achieving a similar effect, server communication is involved.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#190

Post by RandyRanderson » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 6:00 PM UTC

mcescalante wrote: post #128

ausjke wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same here using The great suspender, how does this throttle thing relate to the suspender?

If you are using The Great Suspender, chances are that background tabs are going to be fully suspended so the aggressive throttling isn't even needed. tl;dr - Great suspender is even "more aggressive" than the outlined throttling, as it fully suspends the page and returns all CPU and RAM to you, so it's a great solution for people interested in throttling background tabs.

I use the GS and love it however I'm not sure it returns even most of the ram. Maybe 50pc. Certainly Javascript CPU usage is reduced however chrome seems to slow down based on how many tabs you have open regardless of what they have in them.