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This is an annoying problem that I face and friends of mine agree to this too. When using a site like Digg I tend to browse the page and open a lot of tabs simultaneously before reading each tab individually. Now what happens is, when there are 4-5 or more tabs loading up, all of them just stop loading.I can still see that annoying circle rotating (which means it is trying to load) but nothing happens. I have to stop the load and then refresh one tab at a time to see these pages. I never faced these problems on firefox or opera. What can the possible reasons for this be and how do I overcome this issue ? I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 and my Chrome Version is 5.0.375.55. PS: I use the internet from behind a proxy server at my college. I wonder if that could cause these problems. My friends in college also face the same problem.

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  • Can you try this from somewhere outside of your college to test?
    – fideli
    Jun 15, 2010 at 20:48
  • I've never seen this issue, and I'm using Chrome on 10.04 as well. And I'm a tab-a-holic (I usually load around 20 to 30 tabs when I start Chrome)...
    – ircmaxell
    Jun 15, 2010 at 21:09

3 Answers 3

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Sounds like they are limiting the number of open connections you can have. This is probably designed to prevent people from using bit torrent (which usually requires a large amount of really slow connections, but can really add up).

If my guess is correct, you should have this same problem using firefox. Also, when chrome is currently maxed out, if you try to open firefox it should let you open at most 1-2 web pages.

EDIT: I've been searching for a way to limit the number of tabs that load at a time to prevent them from stopping. The only solution I have found is in firefox by limiting the network.http.max-connections and network.http.max-connections-per-server variables (which was suggested here). This will make it so only a certain number of tabs load at a time, but it will hopefully prevent them from stopping altogether like it has been for you. Perhaps start off by limiting network.http.max-connections (type about:config into your firefox browser) to 3 or 4 and seeing if that works. You can play around with tweaking the value to see what works best for you. I haven't been able to find a Chrome solution yet.

EDIT2: If it is truely stopping your connections (not just limiting it to 5 open connections, but if it is stopping all connections once you hit 5) then you probably want to find a way to keep your computer from requesting too many. You may be able to do something in Ubuntu IPTables or elsewhere to prevent Ubuntu from requesting too many connections across all applications. I do not know how to do this though, may be worth asking it in a different question.

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  • You answer certainly seems logical but I tried it out on firefox and opera and they don't seem to show problems till i try and open more than 15-20 tabs together whereas the problem shows up in chrome with just about 5 tabs. I would like to continue using chrome so if someone could come up with a solution for chrome, that would be great :). Thanks for your answer dan.
    – tapan
    Jun 15, 2010 at 21:21
  • @tapan Then Chrome might be using a trick called "pipelining" in an attempt to make their browser faster. This involves sending multiple requests each time you try and make a connection in the off chance that your 2nd or 3rd request might get back faster, which means your browser can load the website faster than if it just had made 1 request. I didn't realize Chrome did this by default and don't know how to turn it off (It is off by default in firefox, and I know how to turn it on there, but that is the opposite of being helpful).
    – Jarvin
    Jun 15, 2010 at 21:34
  • @tapan upon further research I have found chrome does NOT use pipelining. The only thing I can think of left to try is my other suggestion of limiting the number of total connections your system allows using IPTables or some other method in Ubuntu. Sorry I don't know more details about how to do that and can't really be of any more help.
    – Jarvin
    Jun 15, 2010 at 21:46
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I had the same problem, ~25 tabs open usually and nothing loads when I fire up Chrome - they all just hang and then I refresh them one by one. Usually I can see around 350 sockets open after launching Chrome.

I just managed to clear the problem by turning off "Predict network actions to improve page load performance" in Preferences -> Under the hood. All tabs load up nicely after closing and starting browser.

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Does your machine have a private IP address? This would be an address of the form:

  • 10.x.x.x
  • 172.16-31.x.x
  • 192.168.x.x

If so, you are connecting to the internet through a NAT box and it is getting overloaded or has limits on it to prevent overloading. This would be very unsurprising policy or accident in a university dormitory especially one where the "network shuts down from midnight to 7:00 am everyday". You may also be making a false correlation between your using Chrome and the failure; the kid down the hall may have set up a webserver or sumptin on the same day as you began using Chrome.

Try another browser, and if that fails, learn to decode your sessions with wireshark to really see what is happening.

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  • Quoth IIT Bombay IT Policy: "I understand that network capacity is a limited, shared resource. I agree that physically tampering with network connections/equipments, sending disruptive signals, or making EXCESSIVE USE of network resources is strictly prohibited. ...". They may well be intentionally limiting connections. cc.iitb.ac.in/cgi-bin/policy.cgi
    – msw
    Jun 15, 2010 at 22:47
  • Yes, we do have private IP addresses. And yes a lot of people in college do use the network resources excessively :P. But I only have this problem with Google Chrome. Firefox and Opera work perfectly. Btw good job getting the IT policy, signed it so long back :D.
    – tapan
    Jun 16, 2010 at 11:25

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