131–140 of 306 posts
This should not be the #1 story on HN right now. :( It's a single anecdote that deleting Chrome on two computers sped them up. It provides zero evidence (even anecdotal) that it has anything to do with "Keystone" specifically. It provides zero evidence for the idea that "Keystone" is able to "nefariously hide itself from Activity Monitor". And it also completely contradicts the normal user experience of Chrome, which…
This is total nonsense. Even for malware, hiding from Activity Monitor would be quite a feat. Short of an exploit, you couldn't hide your process without a kernel rootkit, but macOS has required user approval to load kernel extensions for several versions now. I suppose you could go the low-tech way and just name your process "WindowServer" to confuse the user, but you'd still end up with two WindowServers. The idea…
I remember quite well the Google update process being notorious for evading Little Snitch firewall rules. It popped up every intervall as if it were a new (unseen) process. There's definitely something going on with the app signature. (Haven't used Chrome for some time by now.)
Copying itself is odd and probably suboptimal behavior, but it is explainable without assuming malice: my guess is that it’s related to some kind of “before we update let’s update the updater” bootstrapping logic. I could be wrong, but IIRC the updater code is open source, so it should be easy to find out.
[Edit: Oops, it's actually not open source. Their Windows updater (Omaha) is open source, but their Mac one (Keystone) is not. Of course, one can still open the binaries in a decompiler.]
Regardless, moving a program around on disk, or even deleting the program while it’s running (which is possible on macOS), would not prevent it from showing up in Activity Monitor.
[1] http://www.reecefowell.com/2012/11/16/ksfetch-annoyance-on-m...
The author went so far as to create a domain for this rant, and yet didn't even do any performance metrics or basic forensic analysis at all. I'm not saying the author is wrong, but there's a lot of questions here. How does Keystone hide itself from the Activity Monitor? Is there a Keystone process if you run `ps aux`? Did you run dtruss/strace? What is it doing when Chrome isn't running that causes it to degrade per…
Because this sounded outlandish, I decided to have a look on my own system. Since the author didn't give any technical details, I grepped `~/Library` and `/Library` for files containing `keystone` in either name or contents. This yielded the following interesting candidates, along with similar entries for daemons etc: ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleS…
Because there is a rich history of issues that only affect certain configurations, and those configurations are typically only revealed in hindsight: your results have to be seen as a single datapoint and not a nail in the coffin.
To others who are curious about this: please contribute more datapoints
This is total nonsense. Even for malware, hiding from Activity Monitor would be quite a feat. Short of an exploit, you couldn't hide your process without a kernel rootkit, but macOS has required user approval to load kernel extensions for several versions now. I suppose you could go the low-tech way and just name your process "WindowServer" to confuse the user, but you'd still end up with two WindowServers. The idea…
I've had noticeable issues with "WindowServer" in the past (taking 80% CPU usage and causing the fans to ramp up even when the system seemed like it should be idling even after a reboot) so I decided to give this a shot. This is anecdotal but there is a noticeable difference for me with responsiveness after following these steps. Currently the WindowServer process is hovering around 14%.
Most likely the issue was resolved by the reboot, not by uninstalling Chrome. From my experience Mac OS tends to slow down after a few days. Animations and scrolling gets choppy and there's nothing I can do to fix it, short of rebooting.
I've had noticeable issues with "WindowServer" in the past (taking 80% CPU usage and causing the fans to ramp up even when the system seemed like it should be idling even after a reboot) so I decided to give this a shot. This is anecdotal but there is a noticeable difference for me with responsiveness after following these steps. Currently the WindowServer process is hovering around 14%.
The window to the internet should not be some monster that takes millions of developer hours and held ransom by a couple of big companies. I should be able to build my own browser in a 3 month sabbatical.
There’s more to the Internet than web pages. Web browsers don’t even get the most runtime on my machine.
Its frustrating to see replies discussing the definition of the internet.
The point I wanted to discuss is that there are not many choices for browsers and it takes a lot of effort to build one from scratch. Thus the competition is lacking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because this sounded outlandish, I decided to have a look on my own system. Since the author didn't give any technical details, I grepped `~/Library` and `/Library` for files containing `keystone` in either name or contents. This yielded the following interesting candidates, along with similar entries for daemons etc: ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleS…
> I can't help but wonder what the motivation behind making this page was. Why would you immediately jump to assuming bad faith? No grand conspiracy required... the author believes that Chrome is slowing down his Mac and decided to share it. The end.
A lot of skeptical comments in this thread. I'm not low-level enough to confirm or deny the specific claims in the article. I will say that my experience with regards to CPU performance "leaks" and Chrome seeming to always be running in the background even when I didn't want it to, as well as Chrome starting up on system startup when there didn't seem to be any references to it anywhere I'd expect to cause that, are…
What is running in the background/on startup, Chrome itself or its updater? And is this on macOS or another platform?