Boston Linux & Unix (BLU) Home | Calendar | Mail Lists | List Archives | Desktop SIG | Hardware Hacking SIG
Wiki | Flickr | PicasaWeb | Video | Maps & Directions | Installfests | Keysignings
Linux Cafe | Meeting Notes | Blog | Linux Links | Bling | About BLU

BLU Discuss list archive


[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[Discuss] Very slow system, no idle, but nothing running



On 04/24/2012 09:27 PM, David Kramer wrote:
> On 04/22/2012 12:25 PM, Rich Braun wrote:
>> David Kramer <david at thekramers.net>
>> I knew, used, and loved Firefox for years.  But it's too bloated even for a
>> 4GB machine these days, let alone a 2GB.
>> * The "RES" column shows how much RAM each process is actually using at the
>> moment; in this case, firefox is using 264Mb (out of a total RAM footprint of
>> 1174Mb, the rest of which is swapped).
> 
> There's no arguing that Firefox isn't a bloated hulk that leaks memory
> like the government leaks money.  However, there are certain pieces of
> functionality that it just does much better than Chromium, either
> through native functionality or because it has plugins that there's no
> equivalent for in Chromium.  In general, I've been against the Google
> Chrome mindset of ultra-simple interface with fewer configuration
> options from the very beginning, and it frustrates me still.
> 
> For instance, Firefox allows you to group tabs into sets and switch
> between sets of tabs with a hotkey.  This is really important to me
> because I work on several different projects, and I could have 8-10 tabs
> open per project (Agile New England related pages, Arduino related
> pages, general browsing, To Do, ...).  The closest plugin for Google
> Chromium is Tabs Sugar, which by all accounts is buggy as hell and
> hasn't been updated in over a year.
> 
> Another feature (albeit through plugins) is one-stop-shopping streaming
> video downloads.  There's lots of Google Chromium plugins for
> downloading streaming videos from certain sites, but nothing that just
> kinda works on most sites.
> 
> But I am giving Chromium another try.  I've installed some extensions to
> make it bearable, but the lack of a way of grouping tabs and swapping
> them in and out is a big problem.

OK, I'm calling BS on the whole "Chromium will solve world hunger and
fix you a lovely grilled cheese sandwich" thing.

So I changed Chromium over to be my default browser, and opened up a
bunch of the tabs I had open in FireFox.  I now know that it is not
working any more efficiently for me at all.  Remember that Chromium is
running a separate process for each tab, this is what I'm seeing:

%CPU for chromium-browse or chromium-browser: 94%, 18%, 14%, 12%, 8%,
then most of the rest are 0.

Memory: 1GB (yes, 1GB of my 3.4GB), 532M, 156M, 133M, 88M, then about 10
more in the 30M-50M range.  The facebook tab alone is taking about 90MB
and the twitter tab is taking 80MB.

I'm also getting very frustrated with the tabs thing.  I'm trying to
substitute multiple Chromium windows for the tab groups functionality in
Firefox, and it's a poor substitute.  When I click on a link from
another application, whichever Chromium window I hit last gets the new
tab, and there's no way to move tabs from one window to another.

As my memory gets eaten by it and it slows down, I get more "this page
has become unresponsive" dialog boxes from it, too.  There's no way to
adjust the wait time before that error comes up.

There's also no identifier for the window other than the currently
selected tab, so when I look at the task bar I have to guess which
Chromium window is the one I want by the first few characters of the
title of the current tab.

As with many Google products, their hype is not justified in my eyes,
and their drive for least common denominator feature sets does not meet
my needs.  Chromium's architecture sounds better, but practically
speaking it's not helping me, so I might as well go back to the tool
that is a bloated pig too, but does what I want.



BLU is a member of BostonUserGroups
BLU is a member of BostonUserGroups
We also thank MIT for the use of their facilities.

Valid HTML 4.01! Valid CSS!



Boston Linux & Unix / webmaster@blu.org