3 ms·

True, that much is possible. But fairly unlikely, especially since Chrome's updater normally does not even pop up a GUI. We'd need stronger evidence than "I d

by comex 6y ago

True, that much is possible. But fairly unlikely, especially since Chrome's updater normally does not even pop up a GUI. We'd need stronger evidence than "I deleted some Google stuff and rebooted and now feels faster". I suppose the author did claim to have reproduced it on two computers, but only once each, and with no objective performance measurements. Sadly, there are a lot of things that can make macOS 'randomly' seem slower or faster, especially after rebooting, and with subjective measurements, confirmation bias is a huge factor.

rndgermandude 6y ago
Well, the author is blaming it on the updater kinda, but it could have been chrome itself or the updater might be trying to create a window for whatever purpose in a tight loop or do something else that somehow ends up eventually calling into the WindowServer. There are plenty of things that can go wrong. I had my own run in with chrome recently where dwm.exe (Desktop Windows Manager on win10) would eat and eat memory until everything OOM'ed. Didn't use much CPU tho. I eventually tracked it down to a single chrome tab that had a specific website open. It's reproducible at least on my system but I haven't yet had the time to look into it more thoroughly. If I had to guess, it was the website making Chrome use some "hardware layers/surfaces" or something like that and cause the corresponding buffers in dwm to be retained forever. No idea if it's a chrome bug or a dwm bug or even some kind of driver bug, and just closing the tab was enough as a "quick fix".
lorenb 6y ago
WindowServer CPU before/after is as objective as I've got. I'm convinced there's a fire, but I can only show you the smoke: https://twitter.com/lorenb/timelines/1338892756752732169 https://twitter.com/lorenb/timelines/1338892756752732169 For those that didn't measure, it's almost irrelevant — I'm telling you it's not a subtle difference. It's night-and-day. It's very low on my list of plausible theories, but if there was a hypothetical keystone exploit, what is the latest on code-injecting WindowServer? Also added an FAQ to the site: https://chromeisbad.com/#faq https://chromeisbad.com/#faq to address the low-hanging fruit of obvious objections to the possibility that Chrome/keystone is doing something to the system to cause it to thrash.

by comex 6y ago

rndgermandude 6y ago

Well, the author is blaming it on the updater kinda, but it could have been chrome itself or the updater might be trying to create a window for whatever purpose in a tight loop or do something else that somehow ends up eventually calling into the WindowServer. There are plenty of things that can go wrong. I had my own run in with chrome recently where dwm.exe (Desktop Windows Manager on win10) would eat and eat memory until everything OOM'ed. Didn't use much CPU tho. I eventually tracked it down to a single chrome tab that had a specific website open. It's reproducible at least on my system but I haven't yet had the time to look into it more thoroughly. If I had to guess, it was the website making Chrome use some "hardware layers/surfaces" or something like that and cause the corresponding buffers in dwm to be retained forever. No idea if it's a chrome bug or a dwm bug or even some kind of driver bug, and just closing the tab was enough as a "quick fix".

lorenb 6y ago

WindowServer CPU before/after is as objective as I've got. I'm convinced there's a fire, but I can only show you the smoke: https://twitter.com/lorenb/timelines/1338892756752732169 https://twitter.com/lorenb/timelines/1338892756752732169 For those that didn't measure, it's almost irrelevant — I'm telling you it's not a subtle difference. It's night-and-day. It's very low on my list of plausible theories, but if there was a hypothetical keystone exploit, what is the latest on code-injecting WindowServer? Also added an FAQ to the site: https://chromeisbad.com/#faq https://chromeisbad.com/#faq to address the low-hanging fruit of obvious objections to the possibility that Chrome/keystone is doing something to the system to cause it to thrash.