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Valentin Hilbig edited this page Feb 21, 2021 · 1 revision

Big Black Button

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Most time pressing BBB is enough. However if, after pressing the button, Chrome continues to beave strangly, becomes slow, nearly unresponsive and uses trainloads of RAM, and TaskManager (Shift+ESC) does not show anything particular, then probably your Chrome Renderers became disfunct. For unknown reasons, sometimes Google Chrome starts just too many renderers.

To kill all those RAM hogging renderers you can run this in a terminal:

kill -9 $(ps auxwww | awk '/chrome/ && / --type=renderer / && ! / --extension-process / {print $2 }')

This changes all active pages into:
Aw, Snap!
Something went wrong while displaying this webpage.

Caveats:

  • This is not a good solution as it often crashes Chrome!
  • This always closes DevTools
  • If you leave out && ! / --extension-processes / then it will also shutdown all your extensions, including BBB, which will reload all NewTab-Pages with the standard one.

To limit the number, according to Internet, you can use something like following commandline option when starting Chrome:

--renderer-process-limit=2

Notes:

  • I really have no good recipe to add this to Chrome, such that it works if you start Chrome the usual way
  • This has not really the desired effect at my side (so renderers still can misbehave)
  • This commandline option is inofficial and may change any time.
  • Not yet implemented is that BBB detects the crashed active TABs and fixes them when pressing the BBB.
  • If you find an improvement, please tell so it can be added to BBB.

I really have no idea why Renderers sometimes eat up extreme amounts of memory. And I really have no idea how to fix this case properly except by killing them.

All I found out is, that there is a chance that the problems go away after killing renderers. Killing has tremendous advantages over restarting Chrome because killing the Renderers stops things, while restarting Chrome start things, which, again, can take up an enourmous amount of memory and CPU.

At my side I have open more than 150 windows with more than 10000 Tabs open. Hence, when Chrome starts up, it needs some additional 20 GB of active memory. Using BBB and killing the Renderers let Chrome neatly fit into less than 8 GB of RAM.

There are several huge displays attached to my computer, perhaps this sometimes makes Renderers freak out using too much backingstore etc. YMMV.

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