[chromium-discuss] Chrome Extension impact in performance

[Starbug]

Hi,

i have recently installed a few more extensions to chrome, some of them
are dev tool extensions so i only expect those ones to use memory but no
other resources as they are no actively used, and others do not use network
and hardly a 1-4% of CPU when a page is loaded according to the chrome task
manager. Even knowing that after installing this new extensions yesterday i
feel that the browser is slower but probably is only my impression. Can
anyone clarify if more extensions really affect performance too much apart
from memory usage? That would be really helpful. Btw i also wanted to know
if cleaning local storage and indexeddb can speed up loadings or not.

Thanks!!

[Jakob Kummerow]

It totally depends on what the extensions are doing. Some extensions might
do heavy processing; nothing stops them from fully loading an entire CPU
core, using hundreds of megabytes of memory and/or disk space (which might
be totally fine, if they do hard work for you). Other extensions are
extremely lightweight, using very little CPU and memory. So there really is
no general answer.

You can always use Chrome's task manager to figure out if any particular
extension uses more resources than you think it is worth, and uninstall it
if so ;-)

Post by Starbug
Hi,
i have recently installed a few more extensions to chrome, some of them
are dev tool extensions so i only expect those ones to use memory but no
other resources as they are no actively used, and others do not use network
and hardly a 1-4% of CPU when a page is loaded according to the chrome task
manager. Even knowing that after installing this new extensions yesterday i
feel that the browser is slower but probably is only my impression. Can
anyone clarify if more extensions really affect performance too much apart
from memory usage? That would be really helpful. Btw i also wanted to know
if cleaning local storage and indexeddb can speed up loadings or not.
Thanks!!
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[Starbug]

So, just by the fact of using more memory if the extensions are not doing
hard work it wont affect performance right? Only in startup i guess.

[Adam Rice]

There are many ways an extension can make the browser slower. One I'm
particularly familiar with is those that intercept web requests using the
chrome.webRequest API. In extreme cases you'll see a message like "Waiting
for extension" at the bottom of the window, but an extension can be slowing
you down even without that.

Another thing extensions can do is insert Javascript into web pages. In
this case the memory and cpu usage will be counted against the web page,
not the extension.

I think the easiest way to find out if an extension is causing you a
problem is to temporarily disable them one by one, reload all tabs (or
restart the browser), and see if browsing starts to "feel" faster. There
are more scientific ways (looking at traces or reading the extension source
code) but they're not necessarily something you'd want to do.

Post by Starbug
So, just by the fact of using more memory if the extensions are not doing
hard work it wont affect performance right? Only in startup i guess.
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