What should I upgrade to allow faster fluid multi tab browsing in Chrome?

[tracerit]

I like to queue a lot of tabs open and browse that way. With my current build it's kinda bogs down after a while.

Do I need more cores, faster cores, more RAM, faster RAM?

Keeping a look at Task Manager, CPU usage is hovering around 20%, memory at 10-12GB out of 16GB. Disk usage is under 10%.

RAM is Gskill DDR3 2x8GB 2400

 

[Ketchup]

Depending on what is on the pages you are loading, you may need a video card with more VRAM. IIRC GPU-Z can tell you how much VRAM your programs are using at any given time.

 

[DaveSimmons]

You might benefit from a Ryzen 8-core or Coffee Lake 6-core plus 32 GB RAM since Chrome creates a lot of processes and is a RAM hog. One Fark.com tab I had open was using 2 GB today!

You'll have to wait for them to actually show up in stores, but at stock speed the Coffee Lake 8700 or 8700K are probably going to be better with dealing with scripting-heavy pages since they have much faster single-core performance.

But you can actually buy Ryzen, and having 2 extra cores (though slower) will help with 100 Chrome processes.

 

[Ratman6161]

No, no, no you don't need a new CPU. You are only at 20%. You want to buy a new one and get it down to 10%? As with any performance issue, you have to address the bottleneck. Great example is when my father in law bought a new computer because he thought it would fix his problems with Skype and you tube videos. I warned hi that his real problem was that his internet connection was only .5 Mbit and the fastest computer he could buy wouldn't help. Guess what, he was disappointed in his $1,000+ purchase,

So how is your connection? Other devices simultaneously eating your band width like someone watching Netflix in another room? Are you on wireless and if so what is your signal strength? Interference from other devices on the same channel like your neighbors router? Try running a speed test.

Just saying, exhaust other possibilities before spending a lot of money on things that contradicted the underlying issue,

 

[VirtualLarry]

No, no, no you don't need a new CPU. You are only at 20%. You want to buy a new one and get it down to 10%? As with any performance issue, you have to address the bottleneck. Great example is when my father in law bought a new computer because he thought it would fix his problems with Skype and you tube videos. I warned hi that his real problem was that his internet connection was only .5 Mbit and the fastest computer he could buy wouldn't help. Guess what, he was disappointed in his $1,000+ purchase,

So how is your connection? Other devices simultaneously eating your band width like someone watching Netflix in another room? Are you on wireless and if so what is your signal strength? Interference from other devices on the same channel like your neighbors router? Try running a speed test.

Just saying, exhaust other possibilities before spending a lot of money on things that contradicted the underlying issue,

Well, yes and no. I've got kind of a menagerie of PCs here, and I pull different ones out every once in a while, to do updates, make certain that they're still working and booting and ready to sell, and I test them for a few hours or a day or two, browsing, etc.

I recently swapped my gigabit home wired LAN, from a Verizon gigabit internet plan, to a 15Mbit/sec plan on a different provider.

You want to know the honest truth? I can't really tell much of a difference. Ok, Windows Updates, and using the Media Creation Tool takes 2-3x as long to download. But just web-browsing, and not massive downloading, I can't really tell the difference. (Ok, don't know if I've tried 4K UHD YouTube yet on the 15Mbit/sec connection, that may or may not work OK without frameskipping.)

But for basic browsing, anything over 10Mbit/sec, is mostly more dependent on latency than overall bandwidth.

If you have less than 10Mbit/sec, or share a connection with someone that streams videos, or games, or torrents online, then I guess it could be an issue.

So, bandwidth is like RAM. Once you've got "enough", any more is just gravy and mostly unnecessary, but if you don't have enough? Thrash / lag-city.

Edit: So really, you ARE on to something, you need to identify and eliminate the bottlenecks to performance, and as you mention, it may not be the PC proper that's the issue, it may be the speed of your internet connection.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Yes, I'll agree that checking bandwidth first is a good idea.

And also, checking task manager to see where that 20% CPU is now -- if it's something other than Chrome you might need to solve that.

A constant 20% CPU from Chrome does point to a good chance of benefiting from an 8700 non-K that's 1 GHz faster per core with 2 extra cores. 20% constant probably means spikes much higher which could be the sluggishness.

 

[ch33zw1z]

RAM.

browsers, all of them, eat it up now.

 

[lehtv]

There's an extension for Chrome that allows you to put inactive tabs to sleep so they don't use up RAM in the background, and you can configure the timeout for inactivity as well as whitelist sites that you don't want to go inactive.

Chrome Web Store - The Great Suspender

 

[Torn Mind]

I have plenty of experience with Chrome and 16 GB RAM while having a HDD be the storage drive. Chrome recently had an update and once you get over 80 tabs or let them sit for a day and let the memory leaks(I think?) take over the system, it WILL BOG DOWN.
In fact, I'm of the opinion that to be truly be "free" in Chrome 64GB of RAM or even going up a chipset to "X" level for 128 GB of RAM is necessary for "heavy" Chrome users.

You run out of RAM before that quad-core can be truly taxed to its fullest.

Oh, and 25% is pretty much 100% on an i7 because Hyperthreading messes with crap like that. You never see 100% usage on a CPU with Hyperthreading except with video encoding or the like.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have plenty of experience with Chrome and 16 GB RAM while having a HDD be the storage drive. Chrome recently had an update and once you get over 80 tabs or let them sit for a day and let the memory leaks(I think?) take over the system, it WILL BOG DOWN.
In fact, I'm of the opinion that to be truly be "free" in Chrome 64GB of RAM or even going up a chipset to "X" level for 128 GB of RAM is necessary for "heavy" Chrome users.

You run out of RAM before that quad-core can be truly taxed to its fullest.

Sheesh. Use Firefox already. That much memory usage is a software problem, not a hardware problem.

Oh, and 25% is pretty much 100% on an i7 because Hyperthreading messes with crap like that. You never see 100% usage on a CPU with Hyperthreading except with video encoding or the like.

I think that you mean 50%. On an Intel CPU with HT, 50% CPU usage in Task Manager, means all of the cores are being utilized.

 

[ch33zw1z]

firefox isnt exempt, sometimes i catch it eating gigs of memory and hogging 20% cpu with just the AT tab open. i don't typically have a more than 5 or 6 tabs open

 

[VirtualLarry]

firefox isnt exempt, sometimes i catch it eating gigs of memory and hogging 20% cpu with just the AT tab open. i don't typically have a more than 5 or 6 tabs open

Oh yeah. Need UBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and Tracking Protection (built-in) enabled. Then it's smooth sailing for literally hundreds of tabs.

 

[ch33zw1z]

i typically use noscript and adblock plus.

i tried out edge also, it was pretty rough. 2 tabs open, 12gigs memory usage

 

[Torn Mind]

Sheesh. Use Firefox already. That much memory usage is a software problem, not a hardware problem.


I think that you mean 50%. On an Intel CPU with HT, 50% CPU usage in Task Manager, means all of the cores are being utilized.

Firefox crippled itself in under 20 tabs because of google maps satellite view or something, if I recall correctly. All the other tabs were nearly inaccessible. So no, the fox has been dead to me ever since.