Browsers and CPU

Just thought I'd get your feedback, if possible.

I have several browsers installed. Mainly when accessing a sites a couple of sites with flash (eg. say two tabs, watching a foxsports.com.au video and loading a youtube.com video). I have the resource meter running just to check how each perform (obviously with a laptop, you can actually hear if the system is working that bit harder).

Chrome, with several processes running, CPU spikes can be close to 100 per cent when playing flash videos with a couple of tabs open. Tried it with and without extensions. Things improved with extensions disabled, but not by as much as I'd like. WOT, Ad Block seem to make the CPU spikes go through the roof (and you can hear the system working away).

Chrome portable, straight out of the box, was better, but still, a lot of CPU spikes.

Internet Explorer, not as quick to open and close tabs, but CPU is relatively stable (system is much quieter, and with the others below).

Opera with its adblock file, program can use slightly more memory than IE (not as much as Chrome), but none of the CPU spikes I see with Chrome.

Best of the bunch I've tried seems to be Firefox portable, version 3.6.2. With a few extensions installed (eg. Karma blocker), don't see the same CPU spikes, CPU would be a third (30-40% compared to Chrome's 90-100%) of what Chrome uses.

Anyone else experience Chrome spiking the CPU a fair bit (especially with flash sites)? Tried various browsers with no security installed (no sandbox, AV etc).

 

It's Flash in general. Flash is known for that kind of thing. Also, it's likely that since Chrome uses a separate process for each tab, it's eating cycles as well. That's my guess at least.

 

Thanks for the reply. Doubling and tripling the flash.

A google search reveals others are experiencing the same. One link for example
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=5083

Few quotes from page above:

Comment 52: I am on XP x64 and on Win 7 x64 and I am suprised that chrome uses 100% cpu in my 4-core 16gb machine. Definitely a chrome issue - I have to revert back to IE or FFox.

Comment 54: I moved recently to a 2-core 2 GHz laptop, which is very spritely at everything including 3d rendering. However, it cannot run even one tab in Chrome that has Flash in it, without heading immediately for trouble.

I simply can't use Chrome when on batteries: it cuts the life in half, from 4 hours to less than 2. Yes, recent versions of Chrome tend to bound the damage, holding down peak CPU usage to keep some reserve. However, Firefox can run any number of the same windows without any appreciable CPU loading.

Comment 74: Presently on 4.0.223.16 on XP (which, oddly, is apparently the latest Beta and Dev version, which I find hard to believe). I'm seeing bad Flash behavior as before: high memory use and CPU use. I can correct this by killing the Flash task in the Chrome Task Manager, but that's a bit messy.

From the comments, seems to be some improvement over previous high cpu, but not as far as how the other browsers handle flash. For the time being, big fan of Chrome, but it is bogging me down.

 

If you check out peacekeeper benchmarks you will see that the Opera machine which is on top also has the best hardware possible, an i7 CPU with a top of the line ATI graphic card, based on my personal experience, Chrome is far less sensitive to that requirement as compared to Opera, in case of Opera, even a small overclock raises the scores up so yes, CPU does matter when it comes to new browsers, that means they are not taking full advantage of all the cores in the modern CPU and the 4GB minimum RAM in most new systems today. My own personal benchmarks with my dual quad core confirms this well.