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I have Chrome Stable Debug installed on my Debian Jessie Laptop (hal9000 in signature). It will start up and within a couple minutes chrome will eat up several Gigabytes of memory and slow the computer to nearly an unusable state. A pretty impressive feat considering it is only one tab open and my Laptop is a Core i5-540M with 8GB physical DDR3 1333 RAM.
I have tried systematically disabling extensions but it makses no difference. The core Chrome process goes nuts. The interesting part is the same issue happens with Chromium. The latest stable chrome will bring KDE to a screeching halt. The latest Chromium will bog the computer about 2 minutes after opening for about an additional 15 minutes. I surmize it is because it has gone and used up all my physical ram and is then fighting for read/writes to the swap partition (which in most cases is completely empty until Chrome/ium starts. I have a video (you can mute the playback, FF once it hits 3.2 GB, I pan the camera around so you can see details about my system if needed.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIUinTuvz3w showing what happens. Note two key points.... 1, the mouse pointer, it is still other than arranging windows, so I'm not opening other applications nothing major is running in background. The CPU was stable at around 9% prior to opening chrome. 2, The computer virtually freezes once Chrome hits 3.2GB. I click "Stuff for Nerds and it shoots up to over 6GB by the time that page loads. (I ended the video long before then, see attached image.) Longer after, the computer became usable again and I refreshed the page (after taking that screenshot) and it seemed to pan out at 3.2GB. I also ran the following....
So what can I do to track down the issue? Is there any way I can limit how much memory chrome is able to use? I have 8G phsyical RAM and an 8GB swap. That is more than I should ever really need. I have no issues running win7x64pro in Virtualbox with 4GB physical ram allocated and unlimited CPU resources. It barely touches the swap even then.
I started Chrome about 40 minutes ago after disabling all the extension s before I closed it the previous session. Here is a screenshot from when it essentially froze my system. (Cpu usage is low, but drive activity is monopolized). I'm still waiting for it to free up. My 8GB of physical ram and all 8GB of swap is now in use.
Generally, by the time I figure out its a bug and not just me, someone else has already complained about it and its been deemed a low priority because I'm like the second person to ever have the problem. I was kind hoping with the vast phenomenal cosmic powers of Linux, I could limit the amount of memory it is allowed to consume. It's a bit ridiculous that I have to wait nearly an hour and a half to use my laptop after I open a browser. Chromium wasn't much better. Iceweasel burns up the CPU which isn't as big of a deal on a desktop, but it sure is on a laptop when the TM kicks in and the system crawls.
Here is an interesting bit of info. I just noticed that Facebook seems to be the culprit. My start pages were set to include FB. I have systematically removed pages form the startup list (I had 4 tabs open). As long as I don't browse to FB, Chrome and Chromium work properly and my laptop stays happy. I installed Google's lastest Chrome version as a troubleshooting method, despit the versioning differences, they both act the same in this case. Sooooo.... besides endlessly cursing FB, what can I do to restrict it's usage?
I've been using the chrome-beta branch in the hopes the 'bug' is fixed in newr versions. Honestly, I've been avoiding using chrome all together in recent weeks, giving Arora a try. Decent browser, but not very SSL friendly as it seems to be missing a lot of root certificates. Back to Chrome...
Code:
mpyusko@hal9000:/$ time ./opt/google/chrome-beta/google-chrome-beta
Failed to create secure directory (/run/user/1000/pulse): Permission denied
[32313:32313:0330/104747:ERROR:url_pattern_set.cc(240)] Invalid url pattern: chrome://print/*
Failed to create secure directory (/run/user/1000/pulse): Permission denied
Failed to create secure directory (/run/user/1000/pulse): Permission denied
Failed to create secure directory (/run/user/1000/pulse): Permission denied
[WARNING:flash/platform/pepper/pep_module.cpp(63)] SANDBOXED
[32313:32734:0330/104956:ERROR:get_updates_processor.cc(240)] PostClientToServerMessage() failed during GetUpdates
[32313:32734:0330/105008:ERROR:get_updates_processor.cc(240)] PostClientToServerMessage() failed during GetUpdates
[32313:32513:0330/105750:ERROR:media_stream_dispatcher_host.cc(229)] MSDH: Renderer requested a URL it's not allowed to use.
[32313:32513:0330/105750:ERROR:media_stream_dispatcher_host.cc(229)] MSDH: Renderer requested a URL it's not allowed to use.
[32313:32513:0330/105751:ERROR:media_stream_dispatcher_host.cc(229)] MSDH: Renderer requested a URL it's not allowed to use.
[32313:32513:0330/105751:ERROR:media_stream_dispatcher_host.cc(229)] MSDH: Renderer requested a URL it's not allowed to use.
[32313:32513:0330/105751:ERROR:media_stream_dispatcher_host.cc(229)] MSDH: Renderer requested a URL it's not allowed to use.
[32313:32513:0330/105751:ERROR:media_stream_dispatcher_host.cc(229)] MSDH: Renderer requested a URL it's not allowed to use.
[32313:32513:0330/105758:ERROR:media_stream_dispatcher_host.cc(229)] MSDH: Renderer requested a URL it's not allowed to use.
[32313:32513:0330/105758:ERROR:media_stream_dispatcher_host.cc(229)] MSDH: Renderer requested a URL it's not allowed to use.
[32313:32513:0330/105758:ERROR:media_stream_dispatcher_host.cc(229)] MSDH: Renderer requested a URL it's not allowed to use.
[32313:32513:0330/105758:ERROR:media_stream_dispatcher_host.cc(229)] MSDH: Renderer requested a URL it's not allowed to use.
[32313:32513:0330/105759:ERROR:media_stream_dispatcher_host.cc(229)] MSDH: Renderer requested a URL it's not allowed to use.
[32313:32513:0330/105759:ERROR:media_stream_dispatcher_host.cc(229)] MSDH: Renderer requested a URL it's not allowed to use.
^CTerminated
real 15m48.735s
user 4m41.804s
sys 0m21.504s
mpyusko@hal9000:/$
I'd like to point out is took 9 minutes to switch back to the console window so I could kill the browser. Just before I killed it....
Here is an interesting bit of info. I just noticed that Facebook seems to be the culprit. My start pages were set to include FB. I have systematically removed pages form the startup list (I had 4 tabs open). As long as I don't browse to FB, Chrome and Chromium work properly and my laptop stays happy. I installed Google's lastest Chrome version as a troubleshooting method, despit the versioning differences, they both act the same in this case. Sooooo.... besides endlessly cursing FB, what can I do to restrict it's usage?
I'm also using Chrome (Version 42.0.2311.90 64-bit) and there are multiple things that can eat up your memory unnecessarily.
* Extensions. You already noted that it seems not to be the cause of your problems, but they usually are in most cases. Unstability, and tab crashing too... My advice : limit yourself to only a few especially if they interact with the pages since memory can quickly increase with each tab (Ad-blockers are notable for that).
* Plugins. Another likely culprit, you should disable them by default or use the play to click feature.
* Images. This is probably the cause of your problems. From experience, I know that animated GIFs for example eat up memory seemingly without ever stopping. There's no good solution to this, Google has always refused to even provide the option to disable animation in its API so extensions doing it work poorly. My advice : avoid websites using them if you can, and do close their tabs quickly if you cannot.
* Poorly scripted websites. Javascript in some cases when badly programmed can lead to lag and memory problems too. My advice : use a NoScript equivalent, the only reliable extension I've seen on Chrome doing that is uMatrix.
Other tips to reduce memory usage although if there is a leak, it only delays the problem :
* In Settings : uncheck "Use hardware acceleration when available"
* In Settings : uncheck "Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed"
* Add --process-per-site to your lancher's command line (http://www.chromium.org/developers/d...ocess_per_Site)
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