Smoothest and snapiest way to run chrome(ium) on FreeBSD

[Tracker]

Have a heavy browser instance of chrome of ~2k tabs and 3-4 windows (1 main window that's most often used) - with extensions as well.

Initially the browser runs ok but after a while there is a great lag between key strokes/click and the action being performed. Most of the times htop shows cpu usage is not the bottle neck (sometimes it is and killing processes manually does help) - also have lots of RAM (64 GB), a GPU which is very old and not very powerful.

My question is - how to make Chrome run the smoothest/snappiest? Would running it in memory fs help? Has anyone tried such an experiment?

 

[cracauer@]

What's Chrome's built in task manager saying about it?

Are the tabs all for the same site?

I usually kill the top CPU and RAM offenders (always facebook and youtube) and the rest of the tabs get snappy again. But I usually restart at about 700 tabs and never go about 1300 IIRC.

 

[cracauer@]

Yes, moving the profile to ultra fast storage, including memory FS, will probably help.

 

[gotnull]

Sorry for that, but can I ask you guys what you do with 700 to 1000 tabs opened?
I usually lost tracks when there are more than 20 tabs so I am curious.

 

[Ogis]

Sorry for that, but can I ask you guys what you do with 700 to 1000 tabs opened?

It may be just a simple workout.

 

[cracauer@]

Sorry for that, but can I ask you guys what you do with 700 to 1000 tabs opened?
I usually lost tracks when there are more than 20 tabs so I am curious.

My research style is that I don't fully absorb everything on a given page. That would be insane. But if it isn't fluff I leave it open in case I need to revisit it later. So I just move on to the next new tab. Pages with videos I never consume on the fly, but later in batches. Videos are more difficult to absorb for me.

This doesn't just apply to individual pages, but also to groups of pages. Leave them open so that I have an opportunity to give them a last glance later. Things then pile up quickly, especially with API documentations and wikipedia pages.

As for losing track, they automatically end up grouped by topic, usually in separate windows.

After I restart a browser profile I give the previous session a look over and reopen what I still think I want to revisit. That's about 100 tabs in a general case, so the new session starts at 100 right away.

It is what it is, information is pretty widely spread these days.

 

[gotnull]

I see, thank you for your explanation.
I use a different method when I search something I just bookmark the pages and put them in a dedicated folder, one folder for one topic.
So like you I end up with multiple pages but they are not all opened at the same time. And after a while I do some cleaning among my bookmarks, but I still have alot of them even after a good and decent cleaning ... so what I do with bookmarks is almost equivalent to what you do with tabs.

 

[tingo]

I don't have any good news: my machine has 128 GB RAM (I upgraded from 64 GB because I'm a heavy user of both Firefox and ungoogled-chromium) and it still isn't enough, if I run both Firefox and ungoogled-chromium at the same time, my machine will run out of memory within 1 - 2 weeks. Usually I catch it, and just quit firefox and / or ungoogled-chromium and then restart again.

But in the last few months (ok, maybe 6 months), running ungoogled-chromium at the same time as firefox makes firefox and other windows (like Xfce terminl / shell) sluggish. So usually I only run ungoogled-chromium for short sessions and the quit it. I suspect this is something to do with the profile of ungoogled-chromium, but unfortunately I don't know a way to "clean" my profile while still keeping all tabs and windows.

 

[cracauer@]

Again, you need to look at memory monitors.

Chrome's internal task manager and the firefox equivalent.

top(1), in fact it would be useful if you could post a top output here while the machine is struggling.

I do my 700-1300 tabs with 64 GB + fast swap, but that is Chrome only. Maybe Firedfox gets in the way. top(1) will tell.

 

[Tracker]

What's Chrome's built in task manager saying about it?

Usualy don't use this - shows 60-70 numbers for GPU - is that %? Others seem fairly low in comparison. I usually use htop to kill misbehaving tabs

Are the tabs all for the same site?

No

Yes, moving the profile to ultra fast storage, including memory FS, will probably help.

Hmm been thinking of this - just seems like extra work and been a bit lazy to try.

can I ask you guys what you do with 700 to 1000 tabs opened?

Call it bad digital hygeine, or just letting the machine do the work for us. It is what it is.

I don't have any good news: my machine has 128 GB RAM (I upgraded from 64 GB because I'm a heavy user of both Firefox and ungoogled-chromium) and it still isn't enough, if I run both Firefox and ungoogled-chromium at the same time, my machine will run out of memory within 1 - 2 weeks. Usually I catch it, and just quit firefox and / or ungoogled-chromium and then restart again.

Yes! I used to be able to run somewhat longer times too earlier - in fact once I closed by machine after a month like this and it ran well.

But in the last few months (ok, maybe 6 months), running ungoogled-chromium at the same time as firefox makes firefox and other windows (like Xfce terminl / shell) sluggish. So usually I only run ungoogled-chromium for short sessions and the quit it. I suspect this is something to do with the profile of ungoogled-chromium, but unfortunately I don't know a way to "clean" my profile while still keeping all tabs and windows.

I suspect they might be optimizing for the "normal" users and not for hyper-tab users like us.

I do my 700-1300 tabs with 64 GB + fast swap,

What do you mean by "fast swap"? My 64 GB mostly has at least least 30 GB - 40 GB free at times. I'm not sure if swap would come into play here with unused memory.