Chrome Is Bad - Hackdot

Re:Chrome Is Bad by comex on Saturday December 12, 2020 @05:06PM (#25402211)

True, that much is possible. But fairly unlikely, especially since Chrome's updater normally does not even pop up a GUI. We'd need stronger evidence than "I deleted some Google stuff and rebooted and now feels faster". I suppose the author did claim to have reproduced it on two computers, but only once each, and with no objective performance measurements. Sadly, there are a lot of things that can make macOS 'randomly' seem slower or faster, especially after rebooting, and with subjective measurements, confirmation bias is a huge factor.

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Re:Chrome Is Bad by rndgermandude on Saturday December 12, 2020 @08:22PM (#25403433)

Well, the author is blaming it on the updater kinda, but it could have been chrome itself or the updater might be trying to create a window for whatever purpose in a tight loop or do something else that somehow ends up eventually calling into the WindowServer. There are plenty of things that can go wrong.

I had my own run in with chrome recently where dwm.exe (Desktop Windows Manager on win10) would eat and eat memory until everything OOM'ed. Didn't use much CPU tho. I eventually tracked it down to a single chrome tab that had a specific website open. It's reproducible at least on my system but I haven't yet had the time to look into it more thoroughly. If I had to guess, it was the website making Chrome use some "hardware layers/surfaces" or something like that and cause the corresponding buffers in dwm to be retained forever. No idea if it's a chrome bug or a dwm bug or even some kind of driver bug, and just closing the tab was enough as a "quick fix".

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Re:Chrome Is Bad by lorenb on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @02:42PM (#25447476)

WindowServer CPU before/after is as objective as I've got. I'm convinced there's a fire, but I can only show you the smoke: https://twitter.com/lorenb/timelines/1338892756752732169

For those that didn't measure, it's almost irrelevant — I'm telling you it's not a subtle difference. It's night-and-day.

It's very low on my list of plausible theories, but if there was a hypothetical keystone exploit, what is the latest on code-injecting WindowServer?

Also added an FAQ to the site: https://chromeisbad.com/#faq to address the low-hanging fruit of obvious objections to the possibility that Chrome/keystone is doing something to the system to cause it to thrash.

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