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Google Chrome 57 Restricts Activity of Background Tabs

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday March 19 2017, @08:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the reining-in-rogue-tabs dept.

takyon writes:

Google Chrome 57 restricts out-of-focus background tabs to 1% of a single core's CPU load, with exceptions for tabs that are playing music or maintaining a real-time connection to a server using WebRTC or WebSockets:

In September last year, the Chromium team said changes were coming to Chrome's handling of background tabs, but the changes have landed in the stable branch of Chrome a little sooner than expected. Basically, from now on, background tabs will be limited to an average CPU load of just 1 percent on a single core.

Chrome 57's actual mechanism for background tab throttling is a little more complex. After 10 seconds of being in the background (i.e. not in focus), each tab has a budget (in seconds) for how much CPU wall time it can use. (Wall time is the actual real-world time it takes for a process to start and complete.) The background tab is only allowed to use the CPU if it hasn't consumed its entire budget. Here's the kicker: the budget constantly regenerates, but only at a rate of 0.01 seconds per second.

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  • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Sunday March 19 2017, @09:55AM (2 children)

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Sunday March 19 2017, @09:55AM (#481089) Homepage Journal

    I have an intel e2180 CPU, and Radeon HD3450 video. Chrome can't play 1080p YouTube videos under Windows or Linux (open source drivers fedora 25). Works if I youtube-dl a 1080p video and play it in totem.

    Very sad.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Sunday March 19 2017, @02:55PM

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Sunday March 19 2017, @02:55PM (#481149)

    I have been having trouble with Youtube AD loads on my over-clocked Pentium 4. With the help of hardware acceleration, I can play 720P video. However the pre-roll Ads often block themselves by using too much CPU time. The quality is automatically reduced several times. It then gives up and tells me that ADs support my favourite content. Video often also freezes up for the banner ADs as well.

    I suspect they are doing anti-ad-block stuff, but it just makes their site non-functional.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:20PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:20PM (#481158) Journal

    https://ark.intel.com/products/31733/Intel-Pentium-Processor-E2180-1M-Cache-2_00-GHz-800-MHz-FSB [intel.com]

    It's somewhat sad, but not very sad. It is a 9-10 year old CPU and GPU. VP9 wasn't even a twinkle in Google's eye back in 2007, so no hardware acceleration. So your kitchen sink web browser visiting a page full of scripts is not as efficient at video playback as totem.

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