Google web sites and Chromium CPU Use

Chromium is the free software build of the Google Chrome web browser. It’s essentially the same as the Google code but will often be an older version, particularly when you get Chromium from Debian/Stable (or any other Linux distribution that doesn’t track the latest versions all the time) and compare it to getting Chrome straight from Google.

My wife is using Chromium on an AMD Opteron 1212 for all the usual web browsing tasks. Recently I’ve noticed that it takes a lot of CPU time whenever she leaves a Google web site open, that can be Google+, Gmail, or Youtube.

Web standards are complex and it’s difficult to do everything the way that one might desire. Making a web browser that doesn’t take 100% CPU time when the user is away from their desk may be a difficult technical challenge. Designing a web site that doesn’t trigger such unwanted behavior in common web browsers might also be a challenge.

But when one company produces both a web browser and some web sites that get a lot of traffic it’s rather disappointing that they don’t get this right.

It could be that Google have fixed this in a more recent version of the Chrome source tree, and it could be that they fixed the browser code before rolling out a new version of Google+ etc which causes problems with the old version (which might explain why I’ve never seen this problem). But even if that is the case it’s still disappointing that they aren’t supporting older versions. There is a real need for computers that don’t need to be updated all the time, running a 3 month old Linux distribution such as Debian/Wheezy shouldn’t be a problem.

There’s also a possibility that part of the cause of the problem is that an Opteron 1212 is a relatively slow CPU by today’s standards and it’s the slowest system I’m currently supporting for serious desktop use. I don’t even think it was one of the fastest CPUs available when it was released 4 years ago. But I think we should be able to expect systems to remain usable for more than 4 years. The Opteron 1212 system is a Dell PowerEdge tower server that is used as a workstation and a file server, so while I get desktop systems with faster CPUs for free I want to keep using the old PowerEdge server to avoid data corruption. As an aside I’ve been storing important data on BTRFS for a year now and the only data loss I’ve suffered has been due to a faulty DIMM. The filesystem checksums built in to modern filesystems such as BTRFS and ZFS mean that RAM corruption covers a greater portion of the risk to data integrity and the greater complexity of the data structures in such filesystems gives the possibility of corruption that can’t be fixed without mkfs (as happened to me twice on the system with a bad DIMM).

The consequences of such wasted CPU use are reduced CPU time for other programs which might be doing something useful, extra electricity use, and more noise from CPU cooling fans (which is particularly annoying for me in this case).

Any suggesstions for reducing the CPU use of web browsers, particularly when idle?

Syndicated 2013-08-15 11:29:29 from etbe - Russell Coker