fedward, tumbling

One of the things that annoys the crap out of me is when a single web page runs away with my CPU. With Camino I would occasionally either kill the whole browser and start over or meticulously start closing likely culprits until I got to the window that actually took all the CPU time and caused the fans to spin up.

Google Chrome, on the other hand, has every window in its own process. So today when the fans spun up I fired up the Activity Monitor and killed the Google Chrome Helper process taking 6% of CPU all by itself.

None of the tabs went away so I couldn’t tell at a glance which window I’d actually killed, but I found it. This was the offending page. Note that I completely removed Flash the other day so all that CPU was just going to the NYT’s heat map generator, dictionary tool (which I find useless), ads, and assorted frippery. None of those things actually provide value to me, so I ask why the Times assumes it can get away with using so much of my CPU for its own purposes (almost all related to click-tracking in one way or another).

Also? Props to Google Chrome. The fact that I could kill merely the offending window and leave everything else going is a game changer for me. The only way it could possibly be better is if the app itself had a display showing how much CPU each window was using, and/or an obvious URL in the “open files” listing in Activity Monitor. Regardless, I am in love with this feature and I want to buy it a cupcake.