super fast google chrome COLD start!

How long does Google Chrome take to start up for you? I mean, a cold start (i.e., right after booting windows).

For me, it used to be between 4 and 5 seconds, until I a made a bunch of tweaks to my OS this week and now I'm getting a fully functional chrome window in half a second (0.524s to be totally accurate)!!! (again, remember this is a cold start)

The only problem is, I can't figure out which tweak actually made the amazing difference... I'm investigating.

By the way I'm using Passmark Apptimer (tiny freeware) to measure application startup times accurately.

I'm wondering if this kind of result is usual or not...
Would like to hear your results.

My setup: Google Chrome Stable Release 5.0.375.127 + 4 extensions
XP SP3 on a cheap Acer netbook (1.6GHz atom, 1GB RAM)

 

I don't remember Chrome ever taking even 4 seconds to open when I had it. Now loading an actual page was an entirely different matter, and one of the reasons I rid myself of it. I'd say 1-2 seconds was the "norm" in starting it.

 

When Chrome was first released, it took about 4 seconds on a cold start. Now we're on V6.0.472.51 and we have themes and extensions and it takes mine 14 seconds on a cold start, and 4 seconds on a re-start during the same boot. I tried disabling the 5 extensions, but it made no difference. More like FF every day.

 

When I was seeing those start times, it was with both the adblock extension and WOT, so it was pretty impressive. However, as said, it had other problems.

 

Same here

 

More likely it's the cruft your profile has accumulated over the past 14 months on an unmaintained hard drive. Even Firefox (11 extensions, 3 user scripts via Greasemonkey, 1 custom theme, 3 homepages) doesn't need 14 seconds to cold start on my ancient 5-year-old laptop.

 

Eice - How do I clean out the "cruft" from my Chrome profile? My FF has taken upwards of 20+ seconds for years. Can you advise on FF as well? Thanks in advance.

 

The easiest and fastest way would be to simply hit Ctrl-Shift-Del and clear as much of your browser history as you're comfortable with. The most effective way would be to delete your entire profile folder from your hard drive and recreate it (reinstall extensions, reconfigure preferences, reimport saved bookmarks, etc). Other methods will fall anywhere between those two.

First thing you should try is to clear your browser history. If that works, you're golden. If not, report back with what you absolutely cannot afford to lose from your browser profile (if any), and I'll try to walk you through with zapping your profile while retaining the data you need. Of course, if nothing's irreplaceable, just delete your profile and start from scratch.

As far as maintenance goes, use CCleaner to vacuum your browser profile from time to time, and schedule regular defrags. Firefox 3.6.x in particular suffers greatly from places.sqlite fragmentation. Personally, I put my user profiles (and browser data) on a separate partition and schedule nightly quick defrags on it. Firefox takes 6-8 seconds at most to cold start on my antiquated laptop.

 

I think this is going to be quite a useful thread!

My approach has been to clean install a browser. Then run it subsequently in Sandboxie and transfer (after scanning for nasties) essentials out of the sandbox into the corresponding folder on the real system. Then I delete the sandbox and bye, bye "cruft".

Of course, there are some things such as extensions which are better installed using an un-Sandbox-ied browser (after seeing that you really like the extension by first installing and testing it Sandboxed).

Browsers do tend to take our hard disks for granted

(I've not got around to timing things, so I can't say whether the steps I take help in that regard but they should.)

 

Mine have always taken 1-3 Seconds on cold starts and almost instantaneous in next

 

Thanks for responding. I clear my browser history almost every day. That has no effect on Chrome or FF load time. I also keep my hard drive defragmented religiously. I just recently downloaded an extension to both browsers, called "Click and Clean." I can clear my history on shut down of the browsers. There are a few options in this extension that I'm not familiar with so I haven't touched them. They are:
1. Remove flash local shared objects (LSO)
2. Clear Java cache
3. Delete Web SQL Database
If you recognize any of those, will clearing one or more do the trick without screwing things up? The only thing I can't do without is my bookmarks. that's years of collecting.

 

Those 3 are fairly safe to remove. The first is otherwise known as "Flash cookies", the second is a cache of Java applets you've used, the third is an index of data that websites have locally stored on your computer. Like regular cookies, but somewhat more powerful.

Have you tried deleting your entire browser profile to see if that helps?

 

Not yet. I'll have to wait until I have time. I'll try it with FF first and if I'm successful I'll try Chrome. Thanks.

 

Goes without saying, but its probably a good idea to backup the profile (rename the folder to something else) in case you regret the decision later.

 

Will do.

 

You can also export your bookmarks to an html file as a backup at convenient intervals (and you can save this file in a convenient location).


Here are a couple of links you may also find interesting:
How to Make Firefox Load Faster
and
Stop constant hard disk activity by Firefox

 

Vasa1 - Thanks for those urls. My problem is that I don't have the knowledge to understand and much less have the stones to do what they're talking about in the first url.
What do you think about my saving the bookmarks and uninstalling then re-installing FF new. Or would deleting the profile and re-creating it be the same thing? If that's the case, which is easier and quicker?

 

Personally I wouldn't recommend the advice in the first link. I'm not sure if Firefox does this, but many programs perform self-integrity checks to see if they've been tampered with, and won't work if they have. But then again, I suppose reinstalling Firefox is trivial if anything does go wrong.

Reinstalling Firefox won't help with your speed problems, because your profile is stored separately from the browser program itself, and uninstalling the latter doesn't remove the former. Exporting your bookmarks, nuking your profile, and re-import bookmarks sounds like your best option.

 

Even I didn't understand much about the first link! But the second definitely has some tips you can look at.

Now about bookmarks and your profile. You can export your bookmarks to an html file, delete your profile folder and re-import the html file via Firefox's "Organize Bookmarks".

You got to do a thorough job of uninstalling FF since it tends to leave things around especially here:
C:\Documents and Settings\Your_Name\Local Settings\Application Data\....

If you're using some add-ons that get customised over time, such as AdBlock Plus (apart from the readymade list such as Fanboy's), you can also export those and reimport them later since they will also disappear when you delete the profile.

 

Google Chrome 5.0.375.127 with extensions AdBlock (2.0.25), Browser Button for AdBlock (0.0.7), Click&Clean (5.4.1.0), and Google Translate (1.2.3.1):

Cold start: 3 sec
Warm Start: 1.5-2 sec

 

I'm running a relatively old laptop (T7250 processor, 4GB RAM), but with a new Intel X25-M SSD.

Latest stable Chrome, adblock and smoothscroll:
Warm Boot: As fast as a windows explorer render (ie close to zero with animations disabled)
Cold Boot: 0.3 seconds.

If you want your windows nice and snappy on Windows 7, do the following (this will not remove any of the nice aero, and is an excellent tweak):

Control Panel -> System -> Advanced system settings - > Advanced tab - > Performance Settings,
and disable the following: