Taming the Chrome Memory Pig

As I wrote in my last post, I've had problems with memory swapping on my Ubuntu system. Swapping is when programs and data are taken out of RAM and put on disk. Systems do this so they won't run out of RAM. Ubuntu, however, ships with a fairly aggressive swapping strategy.

The way I fixed the problem was to reduce the swappiness configurable in Ubuntu but, as I was analyzing that, I discovered that both Xorg and Chrome were eating a great deal of memory. As far as I can tell, Xorg bloats due to applications not releasing display memory properly. I figure there's not much I can do about that.

Chrome, however, was another matter. I found a Chrome plugin called OneTab. This product claims to reduce Chrome memory usage by 95%. It accomplishes this by collapsing all the open browser tabs down to one filled with links which, when clicked, restore the tab with no data loss.

It actually seems to work. The only problem is that restored windows don't retain their browser history so you can't use the back button to return to a previous screen after restoring a window. Still, when Chrome has your system crawling, OneTab is a good alternative.

Chrome and Ubuntu 12.04 Flash Issue

I recently ran into a problem on my Ubuntu system with web sites containing embedded flash content - like YouTube. It seemed to hose up Chrome requiring a refresh to fix. In some cases I couldn't fix it at all. So now I've set Chrome to run Flash only when I click on the Flash area.

To do this, put this in your Chrome address bar (where you would normally put the URL)

chrome://settings/content 
(note, you may have to copy and paste if the link doesn't work)


On the resulting browser page, find the plug-ins section and turn off automatically running flash. In my case I just turned them all off.

And that seemed to fix the problem.

I still have occasional issues with the Google+ Event gadget and haven't yet found a decent work around other than to refresh the page.

Google And Linux

I am happy to report that Google now supports Linux for the Chrome browser. It was a painless install but I had to close Firefox in order for Chrome to import my settings.  Now I'm off to see if the Goggle Web Toolkit actually works with Linux now.