CPU suddenly racing? It's your Chrome!

W

Weeth

Gawd
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Sep 7, 2011
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662
I've been having weird problems with my i7-940 for a couple of weeks. All of a sudden even with no significant processes running, the cores would zoom up to 70% or so. I checked out everything I could think of and finally arrived at the conclusion that if I got out of Google Chrome, the CPU usage stayed normal. I did a little checking around and was flabbergasted at the answer. Chrome keeps History from its installation onwards and sifts through it when it feels like it. If you have more than a couple of months of History, the file can be several GB large and the stupid browser is going to reorganize it or whatever the hell it does whenever it feels like it, running up your CPU usage to the sky. You HAVE to wipe out all your History at least once every couple of months to avoid it eating up your CPU cycles. What a pile of crap! How can a $200 billion dollar company put out such trash?
 
I'm a firefox user and not a huge fan of Chrome in general, but...

What CPU do you have that this is causing a problem?

I would assume the "history" also functions as a cache and perhaps what it's doing serves to speed up loading time in certain situations?
 
As I said, i7-940, 12GB RAM. From my searching around I'm finding that it has nothing to do with the CPU. The History file just keeps getting bigger and bigger and has to be purged every couple of months. Incredibly ignorant that it doesn't limit the size of the History automatically and there is no option to do so in the settings.
 
I exclusively use Chrome at home and work, but have not experienced this. How frequently does this happen for you?
 
I reinstall my Win7 every six months or so. The last reinstall was about 3 months ago so the Chrome has been accumulating ever since. I've had this problem before but never got to the bottom of it and now in retrospect I realize that my OS reinstalls were resetting everything to zero. Keep in mind I'm a very heavy browser user and some days I work it 12 hours a day.
 
Sounds like an end user issue. I use chrome at work and home exclusively and have 0.0 issues.
 
iconiK said:
CPU is meant to be used, d'uh. If Chrome is using the CPU for maintenance, what's the problem?

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/12/03/10097861.aspx
Click to expand...

The problem (for BF3 fans) is the BF3 beta (and eventually retail BF3 itself) requires a web browser to use literally any aspect of the game, and said browser needs to remain open while said game is played. I'll let you do the math on that.

(Hint: BF3 + No CPU cycles available = x, solve for x)
 
xSystemFailurex said:
The problem (for BF3 fans) is the BF3 beta (and eventually retail BF3 itself) requires a web browser to use literally any aspect of the game, and said browser needs to remain open while said game is played. I'll let you do the math on that.

(Hint: BF3 + No CPU cycles available = x, solve for x)
Click to expand...

Set BF3 to a higher priority. CPU cycles are always available, it just matters who gets more. It feels like you didn't even read the article.
 
I feel like there must be something else going on here. I've been on the same win7 install for two years(at least), using chrome the whole time. I've NEVER cleared my history(although I just checked and it's over two gigs), and I've never had this problem.

You probably have an extension or addon installed that's causing the issue.
 
Just google:

history chrome cpu cycles

and you'll come up with a lot of people that are having exactly the same problem and it seems to be only relative to the size of the accumulated History. As I said I'm probably in the 99th percentile of Google Chrome users as I'm on it nearly every waking moment (for work... not pr0n!!!) :) . It's irrational for Chrome to keep piling on History like that even if the CPU cycles don't get ramped up for no damn good reason anyway. I have better use for those GBs on my SSDs than keeping the history from some web page I visited months ago! Totally stupid.
 
I just did, and I see a bunch of results from 2008 and 2009. Just a few from 2011.
I then did a search for chrome history cpu, and the first link is a google employee talking about how virus scanners CAUSE the problem by scanning EVERYTHING in the history.

Also, 2gb for my history seems trivial when I've got 60gb free still on my ssd raid0 array of my 148(formatted) total.

I'm on chrome all day also - and I mean all day, 5 days a week.

I find it hard to believe that I wouldn't have experienced this problem if it were only related to history size... How large is yours? Are you running a scanner? I've got McAffee. I don't have OAS enabled(which would explain why I don't have the problem if it's scanner related), I just have it set up to do a nightly scan just before my ssd raid0 array is back up to my raid5 array.

The googler's advice is the same as mine: Disable your Extensions, Disable your OAS(try another virus scanner).

Just another example of why virus scanners are the crappiest thing ever.
 
I've got one of the worst scanners in the history of the world: Microsoft Security Essentials. Cry for me, Argentina! :)
 
I've been having a problem with the "downloads" page view. Either by going through the wrench menu icon or if I click on a file downloaded and choose "show in folder" It hangs up for quite some time. It is happening on several different computers.....so unless it is something that the auto sync feature is bringing across to all of them......i dunno....
 
nobody_here said:
I've been having a problem with the "downloads" page view. Either by going through the wrench menu icon or if I click on a file downloaded and choose "show in folder" It hangs up for quite some time. It is happening on several different computers.....so unless it is something that the auto sync feature is bringing across to all of them......i dunno....
Click to expand...

I've never had that problem, but even though I hate IE9 with a passion bordering on the fanatic, I might just go back to Firefox soon. There are still quite a few sites that don't even work with Chrome and you'd figure it would be darn near universal by now!
 
nobody_here said:
I've been having a problem with the "downloads" page view. Either by going through the wrench menu icon or if I click on a file downloaded and choose "show in folder" It hangs up for quite some time. It is happening on several different computers.....so unless it is something that the auto sync feature is bringing across to all of them......i dunno....
Click to expand...

I also have exactly the same problem.

It does not hang but it opens the folder but then Windows take almost a minute to display the contents. FWIW I have that folder linked to another folder on a different drive (non SSD). I also get that Green Bar on the folder as if it is doing some tasks.
 
aviat72 said:
I also have exactly the same problem.

It does not hang but it opens the folder but then Windows take almost a minute to display the contents. FWIW I have that folder linked to another folder on a different drive (non SSD). I also get that Green Bar on the folder as if it is doing some tasks.
Click to expand...

i have a normal default installation setup so its not your settings.....by hang i mean you click on a file in the downloads page and it sits there thinking about it for freaking ever, on a Core i7 machine with 8Gb of ram......
 
nobody_here said:
i have a normal default installation setup so its not your settings.....by hang i mean you click on a file in the downloads page and it sits there thinking about it for freaking ever, on a Core i7 machine with 8Gb of ram......
Click to expand...

In my case it would open the folder but Windows would take forever to populate it.

I went ahead and changed the settings in the Chrome to directly download to the non-SSD drive where it was being mapped to. Now it is opening fast.
 
iconiK said:
Set BF3 to a higher priority. CPU cycles are always available, it just matters who gets more. It feels like you didn't even read the article.
Click to expand...

Or just use a browser that doesn't do that.
 
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