chromium-browser and disk usage

[Yorvyk]

On 31/10/12 16:06, Lars Noodén wrote:
> On 10/31/12, Hitesh Shah <chimak111 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Do you see this with a new profile? If you don't, it could just
>> mean that the old profile needs a clean-up.
>>
>> Also, please mention the Chromium version and how you monitor disk
>> r/w (preferably with apps provided with a default Lubuntu
>> installation).
>
> It's on a machine that was wiped clean just a week ago, including
> /home.  So it is rather clean.  Winding swappiness down to 10 seems
> to have done the trick.  But before, it seemed like the hard disk
> was continually running.  I also notice with top that there are a
> bunch of instances of chromium running at the same time, even though
> I only opened one.  Is there any way to make top focus on a single
> process or set of processes?
>
I'd suggest using iotop to monitor disk access and this script[1] to see 
what is using swap.
I've been experimenting with changing swappiness to get better 
performance and found, in general, that 10-20 seems to work quite well. 
  On machines with less than 256MiB of RAM you do, however, get the 
occasional bout of sluggishness when you move form one app to another as 
things get swapped in an out.
I've also been experimenting with zRMA [2] which seems to have some 
benefits provided you have 1GiB or more of RAM and a 2 GHz or more CPU. 
  Below that it seems to induce a bit of sluggishness. No of this is 
based on any timings or benchmarks but more to do with 'feel' of the 
machine in use.



[1] http://northernmost.org/blog/find-out-what-is-using-your-swap/
[2] https://launchpad.net/~shnatsel/+archive/zram

--
Steve