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What is the use case where you'd want to kill all of Chrome just because there are many tabs open? If there is a memory leak in Chrome, it will almost certainly

What is the use case where you'd want to kill all of Chrome just because there are many tabs open? If there is a memory leak in Chrome, it will almost certainly affect a single tab process, and that can be killed. If you just need a bit more memory, killing one of Chrome's tabs may be a good choice. Otherwise, it's very likely that Chrome is more important than other processes running on the system, in any use case where a heavily used Chrome is present, isn't it? You won't have Chrome with a thousand tabs on a server system, and if you're running something like a massive compilation, you probably just want it to fail if it can't fit in RAM, not kill the whole Chrome process group to continue.

resoluteteeth 3y ago
> What is the use case where you'd want to kill all of Chrome just because there are many tabs open? If there is a memory leak in Chrome, it will almost certainly affect a single tab process, and that can be killed. If you just need a bit more memory, killing one of Chrome's tabs may be a good choice. They aren't saying they want to kill all of chrome. They're saying that in order to know that the problem is that chrome is using all of the memory in order to decide to kill a single chrome tab, the daemon needs to be able to identify that all of the processes belong to one program (chrome).
- simiones 3y ago
  I don't think I understand. Isn't it enough that each tab is treated as a separate process, so the normal per-process OOM logic can decide to kill a tab process just like it might decide to kill, say, Thunderbird?
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Let’s say you have some photo editor using 3 GiB of memory and Chrome using 20 GiB of memory because a lot of tabs are open. Any given tab is < 1 GiB. What should you kill? Logically, you’d want to start killing Chrome tabs as they’re your best bet to recoup the most amount of memory even though no single process is the largest but “kill largest process” is going to kill the 1 GiB. Another instance of this is a shell fork bomb - your memory is used up but each individual fork uses very little and killing the largest process won’t help.

resoluteteeth 3y ago

> What is the use case where you'd want to kill all of Chrome just because there are many tabs open? If there is a memory leak in Chrome, it will almost certainly affect a single tab process, and that can be killed. If you just need a bit more memory, killing one of Chrome's tabs may be a good choice. They aren't saying they want to kill all of chrome. They're saying that in order to know that the problem is that chrome is using all of the memory in order to decide to kill a single chrome tab, the daemon needs to be able to identify that all of the processes belong to one program (chrome).

simiones 3y ago
I don't think I understand. Isn't it enough that each tab is treated as a separate process, so the normal per-process OOM logic can decide to kill a tab process just like it might decide to kill, say, Thunderbird?
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Let’s say you have some photo editor using 3 GiB of memory and Chrome using 20 GiB of memory because a lot of tabs are open. Any given tab is < 1 GiB. What should you kill? Logically, you’d want to start killing Chrome tabs as they’re your best bet to recoup the most amount of memory even though no single process is the largest but “kill largest process” is going to kill the 1 GiB. Another instance of this is a shell fork bomb - your memory is used up but each individual fork uses very little and killing the largest process won’t help.