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Author Topic: Wierd Chrome browser behaviour; or Have I not been paying attention?  (Read 2663 times)

Daleus

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I just noticed this morning that the Chrome browser is misbehaving in an odd way.

I accidentally opened task manager this morning to see 9 instances of chrome.exe *32 running.  I had one browser open.

I closed it and all instances immediately disappeared.  I fired it up again and nine instances immediately reappeared.

Is this normal? My computer's performance does not appear to be impacted, but I'm concerned none-the-less.

Do I have cause for worry or is this some new fangled programming technique of which I am unaware?  Chrome fans keep telling me what a fantastic browser it is because of it's non-standard/non-traditional underpinnings, but I have my doubts.

Thanks for any advice.
Daleus, Curmudgeon-at-Large

zridling

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Nothing unusual.

Main Process:
Chrome's main process handles the UI, tab management and so on. Usually there is only one process that does the work.

Renderer Process(es):
The renderer handles rendering the page. Roughly, each tab consume one, but some special case make tabs into a single one - same domain uses same renderer, and no more than 20 renderer - newly opened tabs will use existing renderer if exceeded. Renderer Process runs in a sandbox that can increase security by separating in sandboxes. When one renderer crashes, other tabs or the main process will not be affected, and users will be able to reload the page by refreshing.

Plugin Process(es):
As plugins should have higher permission than a webpage, and in order to keep Renderer Processes in the sandbox, plugins are separated. Also when one crashes, other plugins or tabs or the main process will not be affected.

Extension Process(es):
Similar to the others, separating extensions into processes is to keep them in sandbox... and a crashing extension will not let the whole browser down.

There is a built-in task manager for Chrome. Press Shift+Esc or "right click on title bar -> Task Manager" to launch it. You can see clearly - and may end processes if one's not responding. Ending processes this way will keep those addresses on your browser, with a "sad tab" replacing it, as mentioned in "Renderer Processes."

You may have a look at http://blog.chromium...ss-architecture.html or read the Google Chrome comics http://www.google.co...ks/chrome/index.html or for more: http://dev.chromium....process-architecture
« Last Edit: June 23, 2012, 03:41 AM by zridling »

Daleus

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Many thanks.

I've read about the process seperation in Chrome but I never actually looked to see how/if it would manifest itself in Task Manager. It's fairly impressive in a "holy crap, what the....." kind of way ;)

I *didn't* know about the inbuilt Chrome Task Manager, so that was a nice perk, and indeed I have 9 extensions installed.

Thanks for the info.
Daleus, Curmudgeon-at-Large