10 ms·

> I hate that Chromium’s snap takes more than 10 seconds to load on cold boot on a freaking SSD, whereas .deb and Flatpak apps load in 1-2 seconds. Can someone

> I hate that Chromium’s snap takes more than 10 seconds to load on cold boot on a freaking SSD, whereas .deb and Flatpak apps load in 1-2 seconds. Can someone verify this? As someone who will eventually upgrade to 20.04, this is concerning.

yissp 6y ago
It takes about 5 seconds for me off an NVMe SSD. For comparison Firefox (installed with apt) starts in under a second.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  Yes it starts in about 3~4 seconds for me. The only reason it doesn't bother me is that I normally use Firefox.
aritmo 6y ago
Clean install, Ubuntu 20.04. Chromium starts in around a second.
- wolco 6y ago
  Whatever you do don't install anything else.
- mayama 6y ago
  Same here. Upgrade to 20.04, but fresh install of chromium. Starts in 2sec in plain old HDD.
- fstephany 6y ago
  Is it installed as a Snap? From what I understood, only the first start is slow. Once the virtual disk had been decompressed, subsequent launches are much faster.
Matt3o12_ 6y ago
Apparently, snaps are compressed to save disk space, which is why they take so long to start: - https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/9scoif/snap_packages_are_very_slow_to_load_in_ubuntu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/9scoif/snap_package... Saving disk space is certainly useful for rarely used apps, however, your web browser (and any other frequencely used apps), shouldn't be compressed, especially if there is ample disk space.
- kleiba 6y ago
  Saving disk space is certainly useful for rarely used apps Is it really? I can't recall the last time I ran into disk space issues, must have been in the 1990s.
  - saurik 6y ago
    Yeah... and when something is truly large it generally doesn't compress well anyway as the large assets are embedded media files; I don't understand the point of compressing stuff like this :/.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    I run on disk space issues almost monthly, and I have a fair amount of terabytes
  - Matt3o12_ 6y ago
    Really? I constantly run into disk space issues. Apple still ships their flagship 13" macbook pro 128gb storage and they charge $200 for another 128gb. While other manufacturer's laptops charge a lot less for storage these days, most still only come with 256 which is not enough these days for development IMO. Even on my desktop, I managed to fill 750GB with various VMs and android development tools (the SDKs, etc). While I am not sure how much compression could have saved me, it could still be worth it (especially since I only use certain VMs or SDK version once a month).
    - ssivark 6y ago
      Yeah, then stop burying yourself with Apple devices. Anyways, it makes sense to maintain something like an LRU cache, and compress only the least used things.
bobmaxup 6y ago
Boots slow for me, but it isn't a big deal in my opinion. I like the prompts that Chromium is trying to open files, etc. Overall, snap doesn't seem terrible to me, but I haven't really read into the complaints everyone is sharing.
nightfly 6y ago
Took around 10 seconds to start for me, almost exactly.
dmw_ng 6y ago
https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/squashfs-is-a-terrible-storage-format/9466 https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/squashfs-is-a-terrible-storage-...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bitcharmer 6y ago
I can confirm this. The same app (tested VS Code, IntelliJ, Pycharm, Atom) installed from a deb vs a snap is like 2 seconds vs 8-10 seconds on my beefed up rig. It's ridiculous.
josteink 6y ago
> Can someone verify this? As someone who will eventually upgrade to 20.04, this is concerning. Chromium was converted from deb to snap already in 19.10 if not earlier.
tasuki 6y ago
I can't - snap Chromium takes about 1 second to load for me on Ubuntu 20.04
bbbobbb 6y ago
I did not notice the load times as I basically never close chromium but I have noticed (not a snap expert): 1) It does not work well with the rest of the OS (e.g. I will pin Chromium to task bar but after a bit it will stop using that icon and instead appear as a new one where clicking the pinned one opens some new instance) 2) It somehow consumes insane amount of CPU for me. I have noticed my fans going crazy (mind you I am using a 32GB RAM, 12 core brand new machine) and all my cores being at 60%. The kicker about that, I did not even see chromium running! I had closed it but the rogue snap processes would not die. I had to sigterm everything and uninstall it. Then I wanted to install chromium without snap but as the post says - YOU CAN'T! At least not easily enough. So the solution for me - download Google Chrome after years of using Chromium because you could easily install it natively (I still use Firefox as main browser but sometimes stuff only works in chromium based ones). It's a total disaster as far as I am concerned. Next time I am reinstalling the OS (hopefully not any time soon since I've just upgraded from 19.10 to 20.04) it will not be ubuntu.

yissp 6y ago

It takes about 5 seconds for me off an NVMe SSD. For comparison Firefox (installed with apt) starts in under a second.

benhurmarcel 6y ago
Yes it starts in about 3~4 seconds for me. The only reason it doesn't bother me is that I normally use Firefox.

aritmo 6y ago

Clean install, Ubuntu 20.04. Chromium starts in around a second.

wolco 6y ago
Whatever you do don't install anything else.
mayama 6y ago
Same here. Upgrade to 20.04, but fresh install of chromium. Starts in 2sec in plain old HDD.
fstephany 6y ago
Is it installed as a Snap? From what I understood, only the first start is slow. Once the virtual disk had been decompressed, subsequent launches are much faster.

Matt3o12_ 6y ago

Apparently, snaps are compressed to save disk space, which is why they take so long to start: - https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/9scoif/snap_packages_are_very_slow_to_load_in_ubuntu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/9scoif/snap_package... Saving disk space is certainly useful for rarely used apps, however, your web browser (and any other frequencely used apps), shouldn't be compressed, especially if there is ample disk space.

kleiba 6y ago
Saving disk space is certainly useful for rarely used apps Is it really? I can't recall the last time I ran into disk space issues, must have been in the 1990s.
- saurik 6y ago
  Yeah... and when something is truly large it generally doesn't compress well anyway as the large assets are embedded media files; I don't understand the point of compressing stuff like this :/.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  I run on disk space issues almost monthly, and I have a fair amount of terabytes
- Matt3o12_ 6y ago
  Really? I constantly run into disk space issues. Apple still ships their flagship 13" macbook pro 128gb storage and they charge $200 for another 128gb. While other manufacturer's laptops charge a lot less for storage these days, most still only come with 256 which is not enough these days for development IMO. Even on my desktop, I managed to fill 750GB with various VMs and android development tools (the SDKs, etc). While I am not sure how much compression could have saved me, it could still be worth it (especially since I only use certain VMs or SDK version once a month).
  - ssivark 6y ago
    Yeah, then stop burying yourself with Apple devices. Anyways, it makes sense to maintain something like an LRU cache, and compress only the least used things.

bobmaxup 6y ago

Boots slow for me, but it isn't a big deal in my opinion. I like the prompts that Chromium is trying to open files, etc. Overall, snap doesn't seem terrible to me, but I haven't really read into the complaints everyone is sharing.

nightfly 6y ago

Took around 10 seconds to start for me, almost exactly.

dmw_ng 6y ago

https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/squashfs-is-a-terrible-storage-format/9466 https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/squashfs-is-a-terrible-storage-...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bitcharmer 6y ago

I can confirm this. The same app (tested VS Code, IntelliJ, Pycharm, Atom) installed from a deb vs a snap is like 2 seconds vs 8-10 seconds on my beefed up rig. It's ridiculous.

josteink 6y ago

> Can someone verify this? As someone who will eventually upgrade to 20.04, this is concerning. Chromium was converted from deb to snap already in 19.10 if not earlier.

tasuki 6y ago

I can't - snap Chromium takes about 1 second to load for me on Ubuntu 20.04

bbbobbb 6y ago

I did not notice the load times as I basically never close chromium but I have noticed (not a snap expert): 1) It does not work well with the rest of the OS (e.g. I will pin Chromium to task bar but after a bit it will stop using that icon and instead appear as a new one where clicking the pinned one opens some new instance) 2) It somehow consumes insane amount of CPU for me. I have noticed my fans going crazy (mind you I am using a 32GB RAM, 12 core brand new machine) and all my cores being at 60%. The kicker about that, I did not even see chromium running! I had closed it but the rogue snap processes would not die. I had to sigterm everything and uninstall it. Then I wanted to install chromium without snap but as the post says - YOU CAN'T! At least not easily enough. So the solution for me - download Google Chrome after years of using Chromium because you could easily install it natively (I still use Firefox as main browser but sometimes stuff only works in chromium based ones). It's a total disaster as far as I am concerned. Next time I am reinstalling the OS (hopefully not any time soon since I've just upgraded from 19.10 to 20.04) it will not be ubuntu.