Thursday, December 1, 2016

Chrome/Chromium hangs often

Recently I ran into a problem when my Chromium browser was hanging a lot when I activated the window or few seconds after opening new tab. First I VACUUM-ed every SQLite file in my profile directory... Didn't help... Then I run procmon tool to show me what exactly was it doing on my harddrive, then I found out it was reading some files, so I went through every one of them, renaming them by adding .bak extension. And then vua la, I found out what was causing it. It turns out it was Preferences file growing too big (even though it was just 450KB) when You visited a lot of various sites in the past, as it saves some preferences for every one of them and the engine/parts of code to read it back and analyze seem to be very inefficient, not to say, shitty. So imo that part requires some kind of inspection to be performed by Chromium/Chrome DEVs as currently it's giving Chromium even 1 minute hangs every now and then.

To fix Chrome/Chromium hangs:
- close all running instances of Chrome/Chromium,
- go to Your Chrome/Chromium Default profile, usually %LocalAppData%\Chromium\User Data\Default for Windows users,
- find Preferences file,
- rename it to Preferences.bak or remove it,
- run Chrome/Chromium,
- lags/hangs should be gone now,
- in case they are not, You may be having some other problematic file that, maybe, uses JSON format to store data as well. In other words its structure should be having a lot of { } " " : chars as well, maybe the other one got too big for You?

You may have some settings reset to default like Chrome/Chromium asking to be default browser or having Translate messages scaring You a lot, unfortunately, You must get past it again now. :)

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