Currently, greedy Flash and Javascript based webpages can make use of 100% of CPU time, even when they are in the background, and haven't been used for days. This impairs performance of other applications and wastes power.
I would suggest that: 1) when a webpage is not visible, the niceness of the webpage could be increased (say to ~18) on appropriate systems [1]. 2) when a webpage is not visible, and has used up a large amount of CPU time, it should be throttled to use just enough CPU to maintain network connections, say only 10% of CPU. This should reduce power consumption considerably. Either of (1) or (2) could cause problems on sites playing audio in the background. Where this cannot be detected automatically, a notification bar could appear notifying the user and offering to run that website at full speed (or pause execution entirely when in the background). However it would also be nice if Chrome knew which tab was playing sounds (as it could then help the user find which tab is playing sounds, which isn't always obvious). I have written a script "stopfirefox" (attached to [2]) to do this for Firefox, but it seems that this could be much more efficiently done if it was built into Chrome. E.g. "stopfirefox" cannot detect which tabs correspond to which processes. Also a script that wakes up every second and runs complex commands also uses more power than would be required for an integrated solution, and is less responsive than an integrated solution. [1] For example Ubuntu 9.04 allows users to increase Niceness and then drop it back to 0 [2]. MacOS X should also support niceness, I don't know if non-root users can drop the niceness by default; we could still implement this with a suid binary. I don't think Windows supports niceness. Windows does support priorities, which serve a similar purpose, but the windows task manager claims that changing priorities can lead to instability, so again I am not sure if this is an appropriate system. [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/manpages/+bug/468518 -- John C. McCabe-Dansted --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Chromium Discussion mailing list: [email protected] View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-discuss -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
