A PC that can run as many instances of Chrome as possible

[Naweo]

Hi, I am looking to upgrade my PC. Budget: Infinite.

I need it to run as many chrome instances as lag free as possible.

What is required? Ram? CPU?

Currently sitting on a non-OC 5930k and 24 GB of DDR4 ram.

Do I need more?

I experience some lag with more instances running, but performance metrics does not seem to conclude any overload.

[tp4tissue]

unless you can figure out which of its threads/ functions is holding you back, you won't know what to upgrade.

And alot of software have stuff that don't respond to upgrades, like solidwork's old ass code which is still mainly single thread.

[JP]

unless you can figure out which of its threads/ functions is holding you back, you won't know what to upgrade.

And alot of software have stuff that don't respond to upgrades, like solidwork's old ass code which is still mainly single thread.

Very true but with an infinite budget you could at least test different hardware configurations and measure the performance.

[tp4tissue]

Very true but with an infinite budget you could at least test different hardware configurations and measure the performance.

As long as ur not engaged in Online Gambling.. Kekekeekeee...

If it's cpu constraint, try testing 3ghz vs 5ghz, (although if the computation requires precision, overclocking is out, UNLESS you have a native application tool to verify calculated values to validate the overclock)

If it's memory constraint, that's easy enough just buy more.

If it's memory bandwidth constraint, you can get the fastest kits, although they are in the $1000 range and you don't get much. again, these arn't ecc kits either, so if you got calculations, not suitable, unless you have a native app validation tool.

If it's drive bandwidth constraint (unlikely), you can get a quad nvme adapter and hook up 4x 970pro 2gb to it, that's a good $2000-3000

Then finally if it's mobo constraint, latest Ryzen Threadripper 3 is top kek

[Leslieann]

Tabs are not the problem.
I've had 250 open in FF and I've heard of others using that in Chrome. The number matters little, it's what's in them that matters, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Cores.
Chrome the browser itself uses one core, and only one core. If you have 5 pages the browser uses one core and the pages can each use a core, but if you load the browser with 2 pages it's only going to use 3 (one for the browser 1 for each page). Once the pages finish loading the cores will go idle so you can have 200 pages open and still only use a single core or you can open 200 pages at once and it will use all your cores until those 200 pages are loaded then go back to just one core.

Now, before you start saying "well then obviously more cores is better", stop and think about that. Why are you loading that many tabs at once but also, where is that data going to come from? I have an NVME ssd that flows 2500MBps, that's equal to 250,000 gigabit ethernet connections to the internet (if my math is right) and even that has trouble flooding my cpu in most instances. Yes, under the right circumstances you could do it with a normal connection by having it process something in the browser tab, but if you are doing that enough to flood a lot of cores I have to wonder what the heck are you doing and why are you doing it in a browser instead of something far more efficient. The only reason you would do that is to offload your compute cycles to someone else because it's highly inefficient.

Bottom line, more cores will load the pages faster, but once they do they become irrelevant. Most people only load 1-3 pages at a time. I have 6cores/12 threads, most hover around 5% 99% of the time no matter what I do in a browser.


Bandwidth
It will load as it can, it may be slow, but it will. Usually as they load up the browser will stop pre-loading until you get to them or wait until you actually open the page. FF lets you preload entirely, but Google is a real pain about letting you adjust things. More on this in a moment.

Memory..
Ram/memory is the problem but not in the way you think or can fix.
At some point Chrome's buffer will simply overload. I don't really use Chrome much but I've seen it chug just the same. Usually they all start to bog down around 9 gigs of physical ram (not virtual memory) but I have managed to push FF to consume 14Gb before it became pretty much unusable. This problem compounds if there is a memory leak, either in the program or something running on a page but going to say 32gigs isn't really going to help unless you have some other program sucking down lots of ram limiting Chrome to less than 8 or 9. I have 32 gigs, 16 is enough 99.9% of the time.

Your actual limitation is one you have zero control over... The programmers.
No one is optimizing Chrome for 256Gb of ram when only a handful of people actually have 256Gbg of ram. Why? Because a browser optimized for 256Gb of ram is going to run HORRIBLE on anything with only 4gigs. The programmer problem is actually even worse on Google branded Chrome than on almost any other browser you will find today simply because google engineers have a 2 year old mentality in regards to letting you fiddle with their browser, they will take their browser and go home rather than let you mess with the underpinnings. Even adjusting something as simple as adjusting cache in Chrome is way more difficult than it needs to be.

Basically there's no point building server grade workstation for home use as the software isn't there to support it.

[tp4tissue]

/Cough,

2500 Megabyte/sec = 20Gigabit,  250,000 Gigabit would be 31,250,000 Megabyte/second 

Di's prolly how much the voice of God conducts @

[Leslieann]

2500 Megabyte/sec = 20Gigabit,  250,000 Gigabit would be 31,250,000 Megabyte/second 

Blah, I knew that was wrong.

Point still stands.

[Naweo]

Thanks a lot for replies.

At times, my 20 out of 24 GB of memory is consumed. Could this be an issue? At present time I am lagging and using 19.7 GB of 24 total ram.

All of you guys are too smart for me.

The situation is, I have typically 6-8 instance of chrome.exe open, eaching containing 5 to 10 tabs. I am processing chart and trading data from a variety of websites.

If a stupid person like me needs a simple answer, does it sound like I could get better performance (less endured lag) by upgrading either CPU, more RAM, or both?

[suicidal_orange]

I am stupid at the moment but I don't even understand what the problem is and that shouldn't be hard.  How do you process data on websites, especially across multiple instances of chrome which can't communicate with each other?  What is lag in this context?

If I wanted to take data from a website quickly I'd be thinking about things like accessing mobile versions, disabling images and only loading the frame with the data not the whole page to reduce data transfers.  If that could be downloaded by a script and directly imported inti whatever to process I'd be doing that  and skipping the browser entirely.

If the calculations are complicated or there are lots of them I'd be thinking of minimising background processes and setting programs with high CPU priority...

[ErgoMacros]

or use curl or wget to download the pages, bypass the renders entirely.
Then regex, perhaps, to strip the data from the resulting downloads.
(If all you want is the data)

[Naweo]

Well, I am not tech expert, but it seems problematic to me that I am using 21 of my 24 available gigabyte of ram when my computer is only running instances of chrome.

https://gyazo.com/1a01b5e7c14a5f3a7a4e964a7bc87115

I am using a website called tradingview.com, where, afaik, you download/stream their data. Not sure why that is ram / cpu intensive.

And by lag I mean input lag or kind of like lower fps, by feel. If I drag one of my chrome instances around on the screen, it is lagging a lot, and almost like it needs to load.

There are like 30 instance of chrome.exe running on my pc. However, there is one thar particularly stands out. Any way I can isolate and figure out which one consumes so much memory?

https://gyazo.com/d693e4ade40f946cdb5cca30b05240a6

[Leslieann]

Yes, you are running low on ram, especially if that is the norm (seriously what are you doing to that poor thing?).

What's eating it though, is it other programs, or just chrome, and if it's just Chrome, find out why. It may be ads, auto play videos or something else (bit miners?) soaking up a LOT of that memory for no reason and using an adblocker to strip them may reduce their footprint considerably. As for other programs, you may not be running anything, but something may still be running add using it. And don't trust task manager to be honest about it, it will show you chrome (add it up) but if you have a rootkit or something it can hide from task manager.

Oh, and try a reboot now and then to clear out anything persistent that may be hiding. Yes, it's only 4 days, but all things considered you probably should restart daily since you are using so many resources. Yes, I know some of you will scoff at this but A. you aren't using 20 of 24gb of ram and B. when it doubt, restart is a common saying for a good reason.

[Naweo]

According to shift+escape, its GPU load in memory that is eating it up. I dont know how to fix that

I always put my PC to sleep mode for bed.

[yui]

from what you say like Leslieann says you are low on ram and windows is starting to use your hard disk drive as ram, if you want to you can try reducing the pagefile to the minimum and this should help make things go faster but will make windows very unhappy and unstable the other solution is to push it to 32GB as from what i have read on forums windows with start using less pagefile and more ram at predefined ram amount (8GB and 32GB from what i saw on the forums)
and for gpu memory , that should not be a problem (it should not really be used by chrome, maybe there is a bad ad somewhere) but the only way i know how to increase it is upgrading your graphics card.

[suicidal_orange]

Any way I can isolate and figure out which one consumes so much memory?

Seems obvious but to isolate which one it is the easiest way would be to close the windows one by one.  When the high usage process disappears it was the last one you closed...  Probably not very convenient unless you have a shortcut for each window configured with lots of tabs.

From the screenshot you aren't using any CPU so the options are throw more RAM at the problme and hope Chrome uses it properly (which from leslieann's description it won't) but as you still have 4GB free I'm not sure this is required.  4GB is a lot of websites!

Have you tried a different browser or is google knowing all your trader info a desirable feature? )

[Naweo]

I will try if the problem persists. Thanks everyone

[suicidal_orange]

Pretty sure sleep mode is not a proper restart, run 'net statistics server' in the command prompt and it will tell you when the last reboot was.

If it's GPU related have you updated the drivers?  Could be an easy fix.

I've ran Windows up to 7 with no pagefile (this was common amongst gamers/overclockers/silence enthusiasts as the pagefile on spinning hard drives was slow and noisy) and the only problem I encountered is it BSODs if you run out of RAM.  With an infinite budget and assuming your motherboard can support the full 64GB the CPU can I'd say you would struggle to hit that problem, though you are running a shinier version of windows so maybe it behave differently.

[ErgoMacros]

Maybe you need the new Intel processor...
   https://www.anandtech.com/show/14979/the-intel-core-i9-9900ks-review

says: "Earlier this week, we reviewed the Core i9-9990XE, which is a rare auction only CPU but with 14 cores at 5.0 GHz, built for the high-end desktop and high frequency trading market."

[Leslieann]

Seems obvious but to isolate which one it is the easiest way would be to close the windows one by one.  When the high usage process disappears it was the last one you closed...  Probably not very convenient unless you have a shortcut for each window configured with lots of tabs.

That is only somewhat accurate.
Not everything gets purged from memory right away, if at all, hence the need for restarts. What you want to do is load up tabs, not close them to get a real, accurate count.

Some of this is on purpose, because what if you plan to re-open it, some is not. Mac takes this to an extreme, but Mac also has the best memory management of the 3 main OS in my experience.

Pretty sure sleep mode is not a proper restart

Even a restart is not always a restart, nor is a shutdown an actual shutdown.
Gawd I hate Windows.

A "power off" actually sleeps Win10 unless you disable "fast boot", it's actually just a deep sleep mode where it dumps the memory to the hard drive and shuts down power.  You can move it and it won't hurt it, but basically the system is paused. It may wake to a clean desktop, but it's preloaded all the usual stuff into memory whether you wanted it or not. A restart done by updates does not unload everything from memory, and worse, even a manual restart doesn't de-power the memory, so anything in it remains, things such as persistent code (works, virus, etc...). A restart now and then it important to flush memory, but a true power off is also a good thing, this can be done by holding the shift key while shutting down.

You can disable all of this by disabling fast boot in Windows, NOT EFI/BIOS(!), that is a different Fast Boot. Microsoft couldn't even be original with the name. If you have a fast ssd and enough memory, and pretty much every modern system today does, your system will probably run almost the exact same as this was designed for spinning drives that took forever to boot. Even a few years ago my system was fast enough that I could boot just as fast as come out of sleep mode, and things are faster today than they were then.

[suicidal_orange]

Is Windows really stupid enough to keep stuff cached when it's nearly out of RAM?  Wouldn't surprise me and if it can dump it instantly I guess it's OK but still sounds weird.  Though Linux says 90% used before you do anything too, so maybe not...

I forgot about fast boot as I don't give my Windows drive enough free space to copy my RAM so it's the first thing I disable, didn't know it was that counter productive though.  Still, come January when win7 dies I'm done with windows.

[tp4tissue]

Is Windows really stupid enough to keep stuff cached when it's nearly out of RAM?  Wouldn't surprise me and if it can dump it instantly I guess it's OK but still sounds weird.  Though Linux says 90% used before you do anything too, so maybe not...

I forgot about fast boot as I don't give my Windows drive enough free space to copy my RAM so it's the first thing I disable, didn't know it was that counter productive though.  Still, come January when win7 dies I'm done with windows.

All ripe n' rdy for the NSA,  I mean,  MI5 ..

[1391401]

just get a chromebook its designed to run chrome and has tabbed browsing out of the box

[Leslieann]

Is Windows really stupid enough to keep stuff cached when it's nearly out of RAM?  Wouldn't surprise me and if it can dump it instantly I guess it's OK but still sounds weird.  Though Linux says 90% used before you do anything too, so maybe not...

I forgot about fast boot as I don't give my Windows drive enough free space to copy my RAM so it's the first thing I disable, didn't know it was that counter productive though.  Still, come January when win7 dies I'm done with windows.

It will purge what it can when the time comes, it's incapable of purging everything and it's not always their fault.
4 gigs free is more than most people have free 90% of the time, remember a lot of laptops still ship with a pathetic 8gigs.

AMD and Intel both are not providing drivers for any boards since 6th gen Intel for Win7 or 8 and will block the usb installer disk. Win 7, about the only people who don't want it dead are the users.
Win8 has less than 1% usage, "It's dead, Jim". AMD doesn't even make Win 8 drivers for RX series cards it's so dead, and no, you cannot use the Win10 driver, they blocked it.

Basically Win8 is already dead, 7 is just waiting for someone to turn off life support. MS is willing to strangle it while it sleeps if they have to.

[Naweo]

I decided to disable hardware acceleration in chrome. It took off 50% of the memory load. Please let me know if I made a giant cluster**** of a rookie error.

[suicidal_orange]

Your CPU was bored while your GPU was overworked - sounds like the perfect solution )

[tp4tissue]

Your CPU was bored while your GPU was overworked - sounds like the perfect solution )

pretty sure this disables DXVA as well, that may not be a problem if none of the tabs have videos though.

[Naweo]

So far no problem. I appreciate your guys continued help and dedication to this forum, and tp4tissue, I sincerely hope you will not be in need of your world apocalypse backup-basement. And yes, I am staying a few meters from my microwave oven to avoid electromagnetic radiation.

[tp4tissue]

I am staying a few meters from my microwave oven to avoid electromagnetic radiation.

Distance is not enough, You need to stand behind a large Electrically Grounded object, Such as your refrigerator. This is assuming you're in the USA in a newer enough building/house that has proper earth-ground.  IF NOT,  then you need to install an earthing rod somewhere and build a faraday cage near the kitchen to duck into while microwaving.

[Leslieann]

So I did a bunch of digging on this and what I found really breaks what I knew and what I've heard others say and do, including experts.

Note: This was all tested in Linux, I have a Windows install I could try this on, but I doubt it will change anything as browsers tend to perform relatively the same regardless.


First off cores/threads...
Chrome launches a process for each type of job, not each individual job. One runs the browser and I suspect another handles images, another handles html and another handles images or something. I'm not sure on specifics but this seems the case. Once something is rendered the process goes idle as does the memory use for the process, but you do not recover all of the memory. I'm on Linux and it seems to depend on what monitoring system you use as to how much to see, while KDE system monitor told me lots, TOP and Gnome system monitor had surprisingly little info. I couldn't see the individual processes broken down, though there is probably a way, I just didn't bother.

And this applies per window, each windows gets all these processes and each has a minimum memory requirement. More windows = more memory used that is just used to operate the process. Closing a tab frees up memory used by the tab but not by the window. Closing a window does free up the processes but the memory used by the processes. Chrome does this so in case of a crash it only takes out the one window/sub system, it also makes it more immune to one window/tab causing all of them to slow down, but it's also super inefficient. Firefox on the other hand piles everything into a couple processes, so each shares memory and processes. This means a single tab can take down the whole thing, but also means each new tab and window isn't going to use a ton of baseline memory just to create a whole new set of processes.


So where does this leave us?
What I said about Chrome using only two cores was wrong (old info maybe), but regardless more cores only goes so far and brings diminishing returns. Yes, more cores renders faster, but this only helps if you open a bunch of windows/pages pages at once. Even then most of them are not in view so they load in the background and odds are you are bandwidth bottle-necked from the server anyhow. So having 32 cores to render 50 pages in 5 windows is kind of pointless since your internet connection is going to be saturated long before the cpu is.

In regards to memory...
More is better, but that is a very small part of the story. Can it use 32 gigs, I'm actually not sure. I used Brave and Chromium (not actual Google Chrome) and both have adblockers. I had upwards of 150 tabs open, many with flash content and I still couldn't even push 8gigs of ram. On the 4gig laptop I tried it too had trouble really filling up the memory. This leads me to think it's less a Chrome eating memory issue and more of a content and browser issue.

Find out what you are loading, is it actually the thing you are looking at? Google obviously loads up the browser with spyware and Google apps in the background. Try loading the same pages in a non-Google based chrome browser such as Chromium or Brave. Also try using ad blockers to try and filter out things. Something many do not realize is that on most web pages half your bandwidth is ads and analytics these days. Blocking this stuff will reduce the load time and load on your system, and while adblocking in Google Chrome helps, it can only go so far as Google Chrome is heavy on the backend.

Maybe you wouldn't do better with a different browser entirely, at least for that content. There are pages Firefox handles better and there are pages Chrome based browsers handle better. Believe it or not, there are even pages outside of Apple that Safari handles better (infinite scroll on Reddit is one it destroys all others on). So maybe take a dual approach, on the worst offender load that in Firefox and do the rest of your things in Chrome. You would probably be surprised at how many people take this approach to web browsing as it keeps data sorted and reduces crashes due to memory issues. The best part is this costs you nothing.


Test systems:
Desktop - Core I7 8700K 6core/12thread, 32gigs ram, nvme ssd, Arco Linux (Arch based, KDE Desktop)
Laptop - Core I3 2735M 2core/2thread, 4gb ram, sata ssd, Mint Linux (Ubuntu Based, Cinnamon Desktop).




Edit:
More info here.

[Sintpinty]

So I did a bunch of digging on this and what I found really breaks what I knew and what I've heard others say and do, including experts.

Note: This was all tested in Linux, I have a Windows install I could try this on, but I doubt it will change anything as browsers tend to perform relatively the same regardless.


First off cores/threads...
Chrome launches a process for each type of job, not each individual job. One runs the browser and I suspect another handles images, another handles html and another handles images or something. I'm not sure on specifics but this seems the case. Once something is rendered the process goes idle as does the memory use for the process, but you do not recover all of the memory. I'm on Linux and it seems to depend on what monitoring system you use as to how much to see, while KDE system monitor told me lots, TOP and Gnome system monitor had surprisingly little info. I couldn't see the individual processes broken down, though there is probably a way, I just didn't bother.

And this applies per window, each windows gets all these processes and each has a minimum memory requirement. More windows = more memory used that is just used to operate the process. Closing a tab frees up memory used by the tab but not by the window. Closing a window does free up the processes but the memory used by the processes. Chrome does this so in case of a crash it only takes out the one window/sub system, it also makes it more immune to one window/tab causing all of them to slow down, but it's also super inefficient. Firefox on the other hand piles everything into a couple processes, so each shares memory and processes. This means a single tab can take down the whole thing, but also means each new tab and window isn't going to use a ton of baseline memory just to create a whole new set of processes.


So where does this leave us?
What I said about Chrome using only two cores was wrong (old info maybe), but regardless more cores only goes so far and brings diminishing returns. Yes, more cores renders faster, but this only helps if you open a bunch of windows/pages pages at once. Even then most of them are not in view so they load in the background and odds are you are bandwidth bottle-necked from the server anyhow. So having 32 cores to render 50 pages in 5 windows is kind of pointless since your internet connection is going to be saturated long before the cpu is.

In regards to memory...
More is better, but that is a very small part of the story. Can it use 32 gigs, I'm actually not sure. I used Brave and Chromium (not actual Google Chrome) and both have adblockers. I had upwards of 150 tabs open, many with flash content and I still couldn't even push 8gigs of ram. On the 4gig laptop I tried it too had trouble really filling up the memory. This leads me to think it's less a Chrome eating memory issue and more of a content and browser issue.

Find out what you are loading, is it actually the thing you are looking at? Google obviously loads up the browser with spyware and Google apps in the background. Try loading the same pages in a non-Google based chrome browser such as Chromium or Brave. Also try using ad blockers to try and filter out things. Something many do not realize is that on most web pages half your bandwidth is ads and analytics these days. Blocking this stuff will reduce the load time and load on your system, and while adblocking in Google Chrome helps, it can only go so far as Google Chrome is heavy on the backend.

Maybe you wouldn't do better with a different browser entirely, at least for that content. There are pages Firefox handles better and there are pages Chrome based browsers handle better. Believe it or not, there are even pages outside of Apple that Safari handles better (infinite scroll on Reddit is one it destroys all others on). So maybe take a dual approach, on the worst offender load that in Firefox and do the rest of your things in Chrome. You would probably be surprised at how many people take this approach to web browsing as it keeps data sorted and reduces crashes due to memory issues. The best part is this costs you nothing.


Test systems:
Desktop - Core I7 8700K 6core/12thread, 32gigs ram, nvme ssd, Arco Linux (Arch based, KDE Desktop)
Laptop - Core I3 2735M 2core/2thread, 4gb ram, sata ssd, Mint Linux (Ubuntu Based, Cinnamon Desktop).




Edit:
More info here.

Honestly this is why i switched to opera GX or brave instead, for the maximum performance of Buildroyale and Shellshock

[cultofjosh]

Leslieann gave TONS of great info. However, I'll give a simple answer based on many years of sysadmin work: 9 times out of 10 on a modern system, you're running out of memory, assuming nothing is spinning. Whether it's from a memory leak, just a big modern AJAX app, or simply lots of tabs open, it's memory. Super budget CPUs can be a problem, but if you're building your own system, I'm willing to bet the lowest you'll be going is i3. Probably at least an i5.

---
Extra comments/babbling:

Modern browsers sandbox different tabs, so they are basically completely separate instances of the browser. It prevents a single tab crash from bringing everything else down with it (glad those days are gone) and adds lots of security through process isolation.

I love firefox, in principle. It's completely open source, has good privacy settings to tweak, lots of great plugins to help...but I also find it slower and sometimes less stable than chrome and other webkit browsers. When I want to completely trust the privacy of the browser, I'll use firefox (plus privacy plugins.)

The new Edge beta (based on webkit, not a MS engine) is pretty nice. It uses chrome plugins just as easily as Brave and seems super stable so far. On my latest PC reinstall, I set up with Edge beta and Brave.

I would only use Chromium if it came from a source that automatically updates it (like a linux repo.) I'm not sure if this is still an issue on other systems like Windows but I've definitely run into chromium installs that were not set up for updates, so their security holes never got plugged. I avoid it outside of linux desktops, but I do use it there as my primary.

Ignoring all the ad blocking stuff, my favorite browser plugins are the ones by eff.org - HTTPS everywhere and privacy badger. I always install those first.

[Leslieann]

Whether it's from a memory leak, just a big modern AJAX app, or simply lots of tabs open, it's memory.

This is true and simple.

Bottom line, throwing hardware at the problem won't fix it when it's a software issue, be it browser or app.

[Sintpinty]

ram ram ram

[Leslieann]

ram ram ram

Just because you add system memory does not mean you can fix all memory issues.
Memory isn't a pot where everything just takes all it wants or needs. Caching of content, yes, but not the program memory.


I have 32gigs, trust me, it doesn't fix the problem.

[Sintpinty]

ram ram ram

Just because you add system memory does not mean you can fix all memory issues.
Memory isn't a pot where everything just takes all it wants or needs. Caching of content, yes, but not the program memory.


I have 32gigs, trust me, it doesn't fix the problem.

Oh D: