what is Chrome searching on DISK?

Hi, guys.
recently there are rumour spread around on several mainland chrome communities suggesting that Google Chrome searches your files, and send the results back to google server. their evidence is the high disk I/O and frequent SSL outbound connections to google servers

I dont believe so, I know the connection is due to address bar queries.
Now the problem is the High Disk I/O. what is chromium doing to the disks ?
before posting, I did some home work.

I run chromium(with Malware/DNS cache turned off ) for 5 minutes under the watch of "process monitor"

after excluding all the temporary, system and google folders, the "File summery" showed that Chromium queried directories on Drive C: for 3 times and did great many CC_Flush. Creat_File and Close_File on "C:"
Does it has any thing to do with the SandBox function?

I love Chromium, I love the native chromium community , if I want to write sth to clear this rumour , How should I explain the Directory Query.

any suggestion would be appreciated,Thanks in advance. Please Help!

 

Not sure what the hell the deal is with this browser,but with the security issues and the constant hard-drive thrashing it caused,I uninstalled this POS browser.

They really need to step up and tell people whats up,because IMO, this browser shouldn't have been released even without some major overhauling.

 

http://impl.emented.com/2008/09/10/google-chrome-tips-reducing-high-disk-and-cpu-activity/ - This person fixed it by disabling the anti-phising feature.

 

People seriously need to stop this crap.

The disk thrashing is caused by the incremental updates of the phising filter and the connections to the secure phising site. This behaviour is exactly the same as firefox if you use that function there.

Disable it in the option menu

 

Yes, Tetsuo !

Task Manager Google Chrome :


Enable Phishing :

Browser : Use Memory 20324 Kb
Tab Google : 7672 Kb

Disable Phishing :

Browser : 19164 to 19440 Kb ( tendency to increasewith the time ...)
Tab Google : 7664 Kb ( steady )
On this same time, I see on Windows Task Manager : 23220 and 9864 Kb ...

Hmm ... hmm ... surprise ...

 

Hi, tetsuo55 , prorootect. many thanks

I did a small test according to your tips and here it goes.
It seemes that Chrome has to small memory buffer for its history records.
and the Safebrowsing is really resource-hoging I bet Google must have a very big mal-site database.



pls, have a look at my screen shot. the second column is Total Operation Events

I have some other shots, but I dont know how to upload them. pity.
I compared it with safari4 dvp pre
chrome with anti-phishing disabled has a better disk I/O performance than Safari4
CHEERS!

 

Yes, that works. Google Chrome help even suggests it while they work on it.

 

hi twl845,
that is only part of the story. look at my screen shot. there is another hogger. the history index is read 10 times more frequently than other normal cache files. and taking much time in file operation too (still 100-10 times more than cache file operations.).
I hope Google can offter some options to disable such activity or improve it.

 

HTTP_USER_AGENT

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/chrome/

Enjoy with this ...

Your Agent PROROOTECT

 

many thanks, Agent PROROOTECT!!!

you information is enlightening indeed, this is a wonderful explanation :

- Every 30 minutes, Google Chrome downloads a list of 32-bit url hashes of urls thought to be dangerous (malware or phishing). That is a download of data from google.com, not to google.com.
As you surf around the web, if you happen to hit a url whose hash is in the dangerous list, the 32-bit hash is sent to Google and Google replies with a full 256-bit hash of the dangerous url in question.
Not only does this happen very rarely, but Google Chrome doesn’t send a url to Google, it sends a url hash, so Google doesn’t learn the url from this exchange. By the way, this is essentially the same protocol that Firefox 3 uses to protect its users from malware/phishing urls as well.

this can explain some of the odd network activity Chrome has. I just need some experiment to prove my guess. Thanks! Agent PROROOTECT

 

i've never used that browser, but i saw the last security now podcast was about it, maybe there's something useful in that podcast

i think firefox does the same thing as Bensec mentioned, i remember watching it connect to sb-ssl.google.com every 30 minutes to download a blacklist, you could disable that by adding browser.safebrowsing.enabled and setting it to false

 

so why deon't I get any disk thrashing with FF3 ? is there some switch I need to turn on to get the problem ?

 

I guess the size of the mal-site list increased? you know, Google has a search engine. and countless web spiders crawling across the whole web

sorry, actually
I am clueless about this. but you may want to see these search results.

 

I don't get any disk thrashing of any sort with Chrome.... but when I tried out a few of the snapshots, I did get some pretty wild stuff happening, like 100% cpu issues and such.... made me avoid the snapshots and stick with the release version for now, even if there are vulnerabilities.... Never had any disk thrashing in Firefox 3 either.... I think the word "thrashing" to describe any of this is a bit overkill too....

 

update my findings:

the files in safebrowsing add together is over 50M (search for the folder in drive C: and see it yourself, if you havent disable the antiphishing feature) and they get updated every 30 minutes. so every 1 hour, little chrome cost us >100M inbound traffic. (sorry for my bad english by which i mean Chrome redownload these files every 30min. still do not have a clue? ok, you can check the time stamp of those files,then use chrome surfing for a hour and check the files' creation time again an hour later. if you have antiphishing on.)

 

_______________________ANONYMOUS Google Chrome___________________

http://abelssoft.de/unchrome.php

Look to thread : Google to launch a new Browser ( Last Page 11 ), also post 263 !

Your agent Pr