Chromium all of a sudden jumped

[Ole Juul]

I don't know where this fits. Is it a rant? Is it informative? Am I asking for help? If there is any, that would be great. Whatever. I feel I should report on this.

A few days ago I updated my 8.04 Kubuntu and rebooted. I don't do a lot of updates because I am extremely adverse to rebooting, so this was a bit of an occasion.

Wow, even after all this time some things actually got better! I was impressed. Konqueror still throws me a big fail screen when I open some stuff, but that is as harmless as ever and I love the ol' thing anyway. The interesting event was that Chromium got an update and now didn't eat up all the memory and go into swap after a short time. Until now.

I type "about:memory" in Chromium and it gives the usual 370MB for Firefox and less for others, but Chromium ... I am speechless. It has jumped to 824MB!!! The system is now using disk swap too. I Lots of it. I forgot to turn it off, but the system did run better without it.

It is important to note that Firefox has uncounted open windows and Chromium has 4 and three tabs. It's funny that it waited several days before striking. I haven't even been using it. What is going on here? I kind of like Chromium for some of it's traits, so I'm willing to run with some problems for a while. However this is ridiculous!

[dibl]

Re: Chromium all of a sudden jumped

Wow -- that's crazy. I switched to chromium-browser a year ago, on 3 computers, and haven't looked back. On the one I'm presently running, with 6 tabs open (and one of them to youtube), I get 201M used.

[kyonides]

Re: Chromium all of a sudden jumped

Chromium100 MB
Firefox150 MB

Nope, I don't think it's eating the memory on my PC.

[Ole Juul]

Re: Chromium all of a sudden jumped

Those are certainly impressive figures kyonides. Even with no extra windows open I don't think Firefox gets that low here. I do always keep more than 28 windows open (to control the icon size) and right now it's at 45, but I don't think that actually takes up all that much memory. I do get the feeling that I torture my OS more than many.

I have a feeling that it's the Flash plugin which is screwing up the memory usage on my computer. I don't know any way to see what it is doing really. It's a sort of stealth program. Browsers talk to it but I can't even pass a note under the door. I only know when it screws up - which is every 30-60 minutes and I have to kill something to accommodate it. Specifically Epiphany which is my "radio" browser. Since I've not come across any information to the contrary, I just assume that that is the way that Flash is supposed to work. Of course it could be just plain incompetence on the part of the developers. I can't code my way out of a wet paper bag but from what I've seen, Adobe didn't get the job because they were good at it either.

I've taken to killing Chrome and I just opened it again. While loading 6 windows and 4 tabs it said about 110MB but when finished it said 326 Megs. I wonder what is going on here?

[Detonate]

Re: Chromium all of a sudden jumped

I have a feeling that it's the Flash plugin which is screwing up the memory usage on my computer.

Do you have the flashblock extension installed?

[Ole Juul]

Re: Chromium all of a sudden jumped

I have a feeling that it's the Flash plugin which is screwing up the memory usage on my computer.

Do you have the flashblock extension installed?

Extension to what? I have AdBlock in Firefox, none of the other browsers have any plugins or extensions, at least that I know how to access. I have 6 different browsers at the same time. Could they be interacting?

OK! Before I hit the Post button, I decided to check Adept and there it is. I'll try it and see. I do click the radio frequently. Since I'm not in a city, it stops frequently. Hopefully flashblock will be compatible with my situation. We'll see ...

[Detonate]

Re: Chromium all of a sudden jumped

The flash block extension, available for FF and Chromium blocks flash from automatically loading when you visit a web site. You have the option to load the flash content if you wish. Sure speeds up your web browsing.

[Ole Juul]

Re: Chromium all of a sudden jumped

The flash block extension, available for FF and Chromium blocks flash from automatically loading when you visit a web site. You have the option to load the flash content if you wish. Sure speeds up your web browsing.

I've had it in since the last post but it hasn't shown it's presence yet. It sounds like a great idea. My solution has been to relegate flash heavy sites to Dillo. hahaha It serves them right.

I still wish there was some way to make flash players user controllable though. Just killing the browser and going back to the site again is a bit inelegant. Oh well - I guess that's how far it has evolved.

[Ole Juul]

Re: Chromium all of a sudden jumped

I've had it in since the last post but it hasn't shown it's presence yet. It sounds like a great idea.

I forgot that you have to restart some things in order to take effect. Well as luck would have it, I rebooted the next day. The effect is extraordinary. I think there are sometimes a number of flash processes working in the background even if they are not obvious on the web page. I thought I was being careful and avoiding leaving such pages open. Anyway my memory usage is down considerably now and has stayed that way for a while. Thanks Detonate!

[Detonate]

Re: Chromium all of a sudden jumped

Yes, many pages will load a lot faster with flash content blocked. Adblock helps too. Install that if you don't already have it.