11 ms·

Doesn't Chrome/Chromium already run as multiple processes?

• Roboprog 10y ago
  I believe it is "only" one process per tab on Chrome. This sounds like having multiple processes per tab (or at least, active tab), splitting up different kinds of work to "specialist" processes. Clarification / refinement, anybody?
  • the8472 10y ago
    There is this concept called "threads" which can be found in most operating systems.
    • Roboprog 10y ago
      Process, thread, task, whatever. (I so remember the first time I was reading about threads in OS/2 and Novell back in 1989 or 90 - no risk not worth taking to squeeze a little bit more out of 10 MHz CPUs with OS's with crummy process management, I guess)
  • Manishearth 10y ago
    Chrome is one process per tab (well, per origin, because same-origin JS), and within a tab is mostly single threaded (at least, this is my understanding). Servo has a one process per tab mode (off by default), but regardless of that within a single tab both styling and layout can be parallelized across many threads, and rendering makes full use of the GPU. This means that the active tab will be much faster. You don't care about rendering/layout speed for inactive tabs, and usually not styling speed either (restyles usually get triggered by interaction, though if you have a CSS game or something in a background tab that might matter). So process-per-tab doesn't make use of the resources it could, unless you're parallelizing within the tab. I suspect most background tab processes will be asleep or doing much less work; so while it helps for isolation (security, and less jank caused by one badly performing tab), it doesn't help as much for response time in a single tab.
  • Eridrus 10y ago
    Chrome is working on isolating at origin boundaries, not really paying attention to it myself though.