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Dante Ashton
Asked: 2011-01-04 09:55:57 +0800 CST

Why does Chrome have so many processes on my machine?

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I've got almost 20 processes for google chrome (whilst only having 4 tabs open, all with barebones HTML) , all hogging memory and either saying futex_wait_queue_me or poll_schedule_timeout.

My fan is going wild by all this and one of the processess is eating up my entire CPU, what is happening?

(Happens to Chromium too)

google-chrome chromium

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Chrome renders each page (tab) in a different process. This makes it faster on multi-processor machines.

    The behaviour you're seeing is normal.

    futex_wait_queue_me refers to a type of mutex lock (fast userspace mutual exclusion) that is used to schedule many processes work on one processor. The state indicates that your process is enqueued to receive the lock.

    Sometimes, an unusually high amount of waiting for a lock can be caused by cpu throttling, but most often, it's normal. Take a look at the sort of website you have open; Perhaps something like Flash is causing the high CPU load.

    To see what tabs or plugins are slowing down your system or filling up your memory, you can use Chrome's built in task manager:

    Right click on the tab bar and select "Task Manager"

    alt text

    In my example, omgubuntu's javascript uses a lot of cpu.

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  2. Having multiple processes is a normal behavior of Chrome/Chromium.
    futex_wait_queue_me or poll_schedule_timeout status for those processes seems okay.

    You could use the system-monitor to see if one particular process is using too much cpu. Sometimes buggy javascripts or flash programs start using all the cpu.

    If you think this is the case, make sure you do not have any unsaved data in some web apps and just terminate the process. Chrome will then propose you to reload the page. It usually solves the problem.

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