Chromium may soon use less memory and start up faster

[harlan4096]

Chromium-based web browsers such as Google Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, or the new Microsoft Edge browser, may soon start up faster and use less memory.

One of the effects of Microsoft switching over to the Chromium development camp is that even more engineers work on Chromium.

Recent commits could soon improve the startup of the Chrome web browser and reduce memory usage as well.

Chrome starts up quickly on modern systems but if you tried to run it on an older machine, you may have noticed that startup is delayed. Chromium-based browsers load chrome.dll and chrome_child.dll on startup. It may take more than a second to load these files on slow laptops; a Windows 8.1 laptop with 2-core CPU and HDD read the dll files in 0.48 seconds and 1.13 seconds.

A pre-reading parameter change could drop the loading time significantly. The same laptop would load the two files in less than one second after the changes are made.

On a slow laptop (Windows 8.1, 2-cores, HDD), it takes ~0.48 seconds to pre-read chrome.dll and **~1.13** seconds to pre-read chrome_child.dll. These operations are on the critical path of the startup.

By (a) increasing the priority of the thread that pre-reads images and (b) pre-reading 2MB at a time instead of 1MB, it takes ~0.48 seconds to pre-read chrome.dll and **~0.51** seconds to pre-read chrome_child.dll.

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