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I've got an Athlon II 240 and often times when I suddenly open 5-10 new tabs in Chrome, both my CPU cores go to 100% and all my previously opened tabs freeze for some 10-20 seconds until the new pages load and render.

Now I'm in a dilemma. I can upgrade to a 6-core Thuban for about a $100, or buy the newest Haswell i5 with a new motherboard for about a $300.

My questions to you guys are:

  • Did upgrading your CPU significantly speed up your browsing experience with Chrome?
  • From which CPU to which did you upgrade?
  • I'm interested to find out if I can (by a rough interpolation from your answers):
    • How much speed up will more CPU cache bring to Chrome?
    • How much speed up will more CPU cores bring to Chrome?
    • How much speed up will going from an AMD CPU to an Intel CPU bring to Chrome?

Please note that I'm not interested in generic answers, like "it's better to have faster dual-core than slower quad-core", instead I want you to tell me about your individual experience with your particular CPUs while running many tabs in Chrome.

Also I don't believe much in benchmarks for Javascript or Chrome, I don't think they can accurately predict real user experience, but if you've got arguments to the contrary I'd like to hear them.

A couple more details:

  • I've got 16 gigs of RAM and I have turned off the paging file, so I don't have a bottleneck with the hard disk and don't need a SSD.
  • I've got 4 monitors, two on an integraded HD4250 and two on a Quadro NVS 290, these are not powerful GPUs, so I'm not sure if they're a bottleneck when browsing.
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    It sounds like you have some serious performance problem causing the CPU load rather than being bottlenecked on your CPU performance. Have you got any Chrome Extensions installed? You shouldn't have to wait 10 seconds for pages to load before current tabs respond again.
    – willh
    Mar 24, 2014 at 22:11
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    "Did upgrading your CPU significantly speed up your browsing experience with Chrome?", "From which CPU to which did you upgrade?" - those questions are off-topic here. "How much speed up will going from an AMD CPU to an Intel CPU bring to Chrome?" - this is off-topic too because it's too broad. You may want to edit your question to avoid closing it.
    – gronostaj
    Mar 24, 2014 at 22:12
  • Isn't each tab limited to a single core? You should compare single threaded performance with that Thuban and your X2 to see if that would be worth the price to you. But I'd bet you'd get better gains going with an SSD...HDDs are always a bottleneck. Mar 24, 2014 at 22:17
  • Yes @willh, I've got a few extensions (one of which is AdBlock), but turning them off doesn't seem to change anything, except AdBlock which does speed it up a bit when enabled. Also when I load simple HTML pages it doesn't slow down much, so I guess the Javascripts and the Flashes slow it a lot. Mar 24, 2014 at 23:07
  • @gronostaj thanks for the warning, however those are questions which I don't expect anyone to answer, I'll make the conclusions myself (if I get enough data). From the users here I'd only like to hear something like "I upgraded from X to Y and the improvement is immense", or "I upgraded from X to Y and the improvement is almost insignificant", etc. Mar 24, 2014 at 23:16

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In my experience, extensions that mess with scrolling can cause significant lag.


Even though the CPU utilization shows that you are CPU limited in this case, you still probably would benefit from an SSD.

Browsers have their own page cache with a completely different purpose (minimize network activity) from the OS pagefile and disk cache, and is not a function of being low on memory. When you hit the disk with a bunch of simultaneous browser cache reads, the head is forced to seek back and forth repeatedly, and throughput tanks. OS disk cache can help with this, but only when the pages/content in question are "hot" in the cache.


Another commonly-overlooking factor causing slow browsing is that by opening multiple tabs from the same server (are they from the same server), you're opening a large number of simultaneous connections and triggering throttling. Throttling when many simultaneous connections from one client address are seen is common both to protect against denial of service and to share bandwidth more fairly.

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  • Ben can you tell me what you mean by "making the requests in sequence"? I always open many links by clicking one after the other, like 1 link per second. Also it doesn't seem logical about the browser cache, shouldn't at least the CPU be free when the disk is the bottleneck? And about opening many tabs from one server, ok I understand the server might throttle the bandwidth, but then again I don't see why my CPU cores should be 100%. Mar 24, 2014 at 23:23
  • @PlainCoder: Yes, I agree that the high CPU usage seems weird. It takes especially bad code to waste CPU while waiting for I/O. Have you tried disabling extensions like willh suggested in the comments? And by "in sequence" I meant wait until one page loads before opening the next tab.
    – Ben Voigt
    Mar 24, 2014 at 23:25
  • Yup @Ben I completely agree that the code on the majority of websites today is awfully bad, just opening a small article of text comes with some 20 banners and statcounters and a bunch of iframes and plenty other crap which is processing intensive but adds nothing to the page. 15 years ago the webpages were content-wise just as good as today, only a 100 times lighter for processing. Still given the situation that is today, I want to get the best experience I can, so I don't want to slowly open the pages "in sequence", I want to browse FAST. Mar 24, 2014 at 23:45
  • @PlainCoder: I was not suggesting you change your habits. Just do this as a test to see whether 10 pages in sequence takes more or less time than 10 page loads overlapping.
    – Ben Voigt
    Mar 24, 2014 at 23:52
  • Oh it doesn't make a difference to the total time (at least the CPU time I think). I haven't done a measured test, but whether I open them slowly one by one, or I click them all at once, it seems to me the total time it takes is either the same, or it might take longer opening them one by one because the CPU will be idle at times waiting for the data from the network. Mar 25, 2014 at 0:02

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