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

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) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> 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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @10:13AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @10:13AM (#481092)

    Play inaudible music in your tab as well if the user agent betrays a google follower...

    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday March 19 2017, @11:58AM

      by Bot (3902) on Sunday March 19 2017, @11:58AM (#481108) Journal

      and if google checks the output level of the played sound to avoid that trick of yours, play the sound of laptop fans. Especially funny if you are on a chromebook.

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    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:22PM (2 children)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:22PM (#481159) Journal

      It has to be audible. If there is a stretch of silence during audio/video playback, the indicator on the tab goes away.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:43PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:43PM (#481173)

        Not silence but less than 50 Hz or more than 15 kHz sound for example etc.

    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday March 20 2017, @09:57PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Monday March 20 2017, @09:57PM (#481808) Homepage

      Having the audio indicator on a tab without any audible sound is pretty suspicious.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 19 2017, @10:52AM (1 child)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday March 19 2017, @10:52AM (#481098) Homepage

    They are preparing you for austerity measures.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:39PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:39PM (#481171)

    i wonder how firefox manages this problem b/c firefox bogs down my whole computer with many tabs open, especially if amazon or other angular/js heavy site in amongst them. At least the latest release now blocks my log in form fields with a poorly implemented warning about the dangers of no https. If you forget to anticipate the warning box it pops in to your way making you accidentally click on the box which loads their site explaining what freaking https is. I don't really mind the idea but it has to stay out of the way. ever heard of testing mozilla? ever heard of local dev mozilla(no https there)? have you bothered to implement all of html5 elements yet? what about rtsp support for the html5 video element? too busy treating us like we're idiots instead of getting your browser caught up on features that actually matter or are at the core a a browser's mission. Speed(FF is too slow!), security/privacy(not even close!) and rendering all the stuff/standards(yeah right!). do all that, then worry about saving Norms from themselves if you have time. if you actually do all that, i doubt you will. I still use FF as my primary browser but it's getting harder and harder.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by julian on Sunday March 19 2017, @06:33PM (3 children)

      by julian (6003) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 19 2017, @06:33PM (#481220)

      I'll probably butcher this explanation but I think I understand the gist of it. The reason this happens in Firefox is there's a single process that handles every tab and the GUI, so if one tab is doing a lot of work in the background it makes the entire browser unresponsive until its done. Chrome spreads the work over multiple processes and cores so that the entire experience feels more responsive under load (at the cost of using more of your computer's resources).

      The other issues you mentioned are the result of Mozilla squandering money and dev time on side projects which might be interesting but don't improve their core product, the Firefox browser. They are not like Google. Google has so much money and so many developers they can afford to let many of them work on projects that probably will never pan out on the off chance they'll get something hugely successful like Gmail.

      Mozilla has to be a leaner, more focused, company/foundation. They can, at most, do maybe 2 things well at a time. I wish they'd stick to Firefox, especially catching up on speed and security, and then if there's any time or resources left over do more advocacy for net neutrality, and keeping the Internet free and open. How many man-years were wasted on their phone OS that no one will ever use?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @07:29AM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @07:29AM (#481384)

        Mozilla could probably save a good bit of money by not renting prime office space in major cities. I noticed their Taibei office right across from Taipei 101, other tenants are big finance outfits.

        • (Score: 1) by toddestan on Wednesday March 22 2017, @12:34AM (1 child)

          by toddestan (4982) on Wednesday March 22 2017, @12:34AM (#482479)

          The Mozilla Foundation brings in something like $330 million a year. Sure, there's some overhead and they have some other projects, but with a third of a billion dollars I would think they could completely rewrite Firefox from scratch every year.

          Then again, maybe browsers are really hard. Microsoft is a lot bigger than Mozilla and the best they can seem to come up with is Edge.

          • (Score: 2) by julian on Wednesday March 22 2017, @04:47AM

            by julian (6003) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 22 2017, @04:47AM (#482542)

            Then again, maybe browsers are really hard.

            They really are. They really are because of what we demand browsers be capable of in 2017. It's comparable to building an entire operating system. You're right though about the scale of the problem. $1B*0.33 ought to be enough to develop a browser. But Mozilla isn't just a browser company.

            They should be, IMO. Hence the tension. Mozilla should be the foundation making the Firefox browser. If there's anything left over, consider something else.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @06:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @06:05PM (#481212)
    If I recall correctly some tabs with ads on Chrome use about 10-25 watts (based on my UPS load). Might save a fair bit of power worldwide, maybe more than hunting down 1W wall warts ;).
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