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 ;-)

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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.

On 17 June 2018 at 00:13, Starbug <ander...@gmail.com> wrote:

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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