Anyone know why Chrome (maybe Javascript) sometimes goes haywire when it sits in the background?

[jducoeur]

I'm one of those people who tends to have open tabs in my browser. Like, *lots* of open tabs. Like, 50 or more.

I'm not sure if it's a recent change, but the past week I've been noticing a tendency for Chrome to start chewing 50% of my CPU (that is, two cores) when I'm not doing anything. When I investigate, it always seems to be that two tabs that are *not* currently on top are each eating 25% of CPU. It's not the same tabs each time, but it does always seem to be "heavy" pages that are likely to be full of Javascript. The problem usually goes away simply by finding and clicking on that tab, bringing it to the front. My best guess is that the Javascript on these pages is getting into some kind of frantic loop, doing something that isn't allowed while it's in the background, but that's just a guess.

Anybody have any concrete ideas what is happening here? I ask mostly out of idle curiosity, but also because there may be an anti-pattern that I want Querki to avoid...

Comments

[serakit.livejournal.com]

I have no idea why, but it does it to me too, but with flash-- I go and end whatever process is chewing up memory or CPU (it varies which one it starts chewing) and I get "Shockwave flash has crashed" as a result. It's been doing that for months if not years, on an irregular basis.

[jducoeur]

Well, Flash is qualitatively different, enough so to count as a different problem. It's basically a whole separate product that is hosted inside the browser window. And it's famously a little bit unreliable...