Chrome browser, high morning activity.

When I switch on the computer in the morning I check Task Manager.

Chrome browser starts up with high activity (25% CPU) for a while,
then falls to normal activity. Why? Can I stop this?

Peter Jason wrote:
When I switch on the computer in the morning I check Task Manager.

Chrome browser starts up with high activity (25% CPU) for a while,
then falls to normal activity. Why? Can I stop this?

What's the size of this folder ?

C:\Users\Peter\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache

I've only got about 240MB down in that neighborhood.
(I have a Chrome-alike browser which doesn't use exactly
the same folder names.) My files are split between two
folders, one for multimedia (movie playback) and the
other for general web files. Each folder has about 200 files.

If you managed, somehow, to define a max_cache size in some
setting, which is extremely large, it will take a long time
to load and validate that at startup.

My brother did that to Internet Explorer once. Read some
article that said to boost the cache size - which led to
some unscale-able behavior. Things were quite slow, until
the cache was cleaned out, and I think deleting the cache
might have taken him around ten minutes or so.

For some caches, you can move them to a separate RAMDisk.
There are also sometimes options to move the cache to
system memory. Whether that's a good idea, who knows.
I find whatever the default on my browser was, seems
to be "good enough" here.

If you start up Process Monitor before opening Chrome, you
might be able to snapshot all the file reads (filenames,
folder paths of those reads), and from that, conclude which
cache folder it's having a field day inside. You'll see
an executable name with "Chrome" in it, and ReadFile or
CreateFile operations. You can set filters to be more
specific, if there is too much "noise" in the trace.
Don't forget to go to the File menu and remove the tick mark,
after you're sure the Chrome fireworks display is over, so
that the trace does not become overly large. You would wait
until the I/O subsides and Chrome appears to be running, before
stopping the trace.

I get a nickel, every time someone downloads a copy :-)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...nloads/procmon

Paul

On Tue, 10 Mar 2020 01:56:15 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Peter Jason wrote:
When I switch on the computer in the morning I check Task Manager.

Chrome browser starts up with high activity (25% CPU) for a while,
then falls to normal activity. Why? Can I stop this?

What's the size of this folder ?

It's 387MB. Is it sending vital statistics back to base?


C:\Users\Peter\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache

I've only got about 240MB down in that neighborhood.
(I have a Chrome-alike browser which doesn't use exactly
the same folder names.) My files are split between two
folders, one for multimedia (movie playback) and the
other for general web files. Each folder has about 200 files.

If you managed, somehow, to define a max_cache size in some
setting, which is extremely large, it will take a long time
to load and validate that at startup.

My brother did that to Internet Explorer once. Read some
article that said to boost the cache size - which led to
some unscale-able behavior. Things were quite slow, until
the cache was cleaned out, and I think deleting the cache
might have taken him around ten minutes or so.

For some caches, you can move them to a separate RAMDisk.
There are also sometimes options to move the cache to
system memory. Whether that's a good idea, who knows.
I find whatever the default on my browser was, seems
to be "good enough" here.

If you start up Process Monitor before opening Chrome, you
might be able to snapshot all the file reads (filenames,
folder paths of those reads), and from that, conclude which
cache folder it's having a field day inside. You'll see
an executable name with "Chrome" in it, and ReadFile or
CreateFile operations. You can set filters to be more
specific, if there is too much "noise" in the trace.
Don't forget to go to the File menu and remove the tick mark,
after you're sure the Chrome fireworks display is over, so
that the trace does not become overly large. You would wait
until the I/O subsides and Chrome appears to be running, before
stopping the trace.

I get a nickel, every time someone downloads a copy :-)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...nloads/procmon

Paul

Thanks Paul, I'll check this out

Peter Jason wrote:
On Tue, 10 Mar 2020 01:56:15 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Peter Jason wrote:
When I switch on the computer in the morning I check Task Manager.

Chrome browser starts up with high activity (25% CPU) for a while,
then falls to normal activity. Why? Can I stop this?
What's the size of this folder ?

It's 387MB. Is it sending vital statistics back to base?

C:\Users\Peter\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache

I've only got about 240MB down in that neighborhood.
(I have a Chrome-alike browser which doesn't use exactly
the same folder names.) My files are split between two
folders, one for multimedia (movie playback) and the
other for general web files. Each folder has about 200 files.

If you managed, somehow, to define a max_cache size in some
setting, which is extremely large, it will take a long time
to load and validate that at startup.

My brother did that to Internet Explorer once. Read some
article that said to boost the cache size - which led to
some unscale-able behavior. Things were quite slow, until
the cache was cleaned out, and I think deleting the cache
might have taken him around ten minutes or so.

For some caches, you can move them to a separate RAMDisk.
There are also sometimes options to move the cache to
system memory. Whether that's a good idea, who knows.
I find whatever the default on my browser was, seems
to be "good enough" here.

If you start up Process Monitor before opening Chrome, you
might be able to snapshot all the file reads (filenames,
folder paths of those reads), and from that, conclude which
cache folder it's having a field day inside. You'll see
an executable name with "Chrome" in it, and ReadFile or
CreateFile operations. You can set filters to be more
specific, if there is too much "noise" in the trace.
Don't forget to go to the File menu and remove the tick mark,
after you're sure the Chrome fireworks display is over, so
that the trace does not become overly large. You would wait
until the I/O subsides and Chrome appears to be running, before
stopping the trace.

I get a nickel, every time someone downloads a copy :-)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...nloads/procmon

Paul

Thanks Paul, I'll check this out

If it's that small, that's probably not the problem.

But try your ProcMon run anyway, and see if you can see
anything out of the ordinary on startup.

*******

Articles like this are well-meaning, but they
leave a lot to the imagination in terms of what
is actually getting fixed. The "Cleanup Tool" for
example, doesn't really clean anything except
maybe the cache folder. There's more in Chrome
I'd want to clean than that. But Google isn't going
to throw away anything it uses for tracking. That's
money in the bank for them.

https://www.howtogeek.com/119191/bro...me-fast-again/

Paul

"Paul" wrote

| My brother did that to Internet Explorer once. Read some
| article that said to boost the cache size - which led to
| some unscale-able behavior. Things were quite slow, until
| the cache was cleaned out, and I think deleting the cache
| might have taken him around ten minutes or so.
|

That used to be a common problem with IE. It
seems to be connected with the IE/Explorer tie-in.
I don't know if it still happens, but it was the first
thing I'd check on Win98 when it inexplicably
started to move like molasses. On the other hand,
there's really no reason for cache anymore. I keep
mine limited to 10 MB.

When cache was invented we had dial-up and
webpages were static. No sense downloading the
background picture of a webpage again if it hasn't
changed. Why wait 25 seconds for that? (Remember
how we had to wait for progressive JPGs to fill in?)
No sense downloading the webpage at all, in fact.
Just bring up the cache version. But that was a different
time and most webpages were HTML fils on servers
that rarely changed.

These days most people are on high-speed.
Webpages are often 2-20 MB. And the vast majority
are using ASP, PHP, or coming out of a database.
Many consist only of script designed to build
the page dynamically, after checking the visitor's
screen size and possibly other factors. What all of
that means is that browsers almost never get a
304 response (no changes. use cache.) Every page
loaded is brand new, even if it hasn't changed since
last year. So the whole point of cache has been all
but eliminated. It's storing files that will never
be called up.

What I wondered.... Why is Chrome being allowed
to load at boot? Is that typical? I've never used
Chrome, but I haven't seen other browsers try to load
at boot.

On Tue, 10 Mar 2020 15:26:41 +1100, Peter Jason wrote:

When I switch on the computer in the morning I check Task Manager.

Chrome browser starts up with high activity (25% CPU) for a while,
then falls to normal activity. Why? Can I stop this?

Is it just with W10?

I use Chrome with W7 and I have not noticed a problem.

Steve

--
http://www.npsnn.com

Mayayana wrote:


What I wondered.... Why is Chrome being allowed
to load at boot? Is that typical? I've never used
Chrome, but I haven't seen other browsers try to load
at boot.

Some of the browsers have "fast start" options, where
they load at bootup, so you have the illusion that
they aren't actually slow to start up.

And no, I wouldn't consciously select such an option.
Not on my gutless machine. There's enough "chugging"
on these machines at boot, as it is :-)

Windows 10 has the option, of the suspended state for
Metro Apps. Where when you quit them, they sit in memory,
but the memory is not "booked". It's another shade of the
system read cache, or looks like it. If put under enough
memory pressure, the suspended material is evicted. But the
design of Metro Apps is a bit dodgy - the last example
was the Groove music player opened when I clicked a .wav
file, and instead of staying open, it disappeared when
I didn't expect it to disappear. I fired up Windows Media
Player and it stayed put. Groove still has bad table manners.
At one time, Groove could not play music in the background,
and if you iconified it, the music would stop. As a
"Computer Science re-invention", to me Metro is a bust.
An example of how not to do it. If I open an application,
it should stay open and it shouldn't be doing unexpected
state changes to scare or annoy me.

Paul