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In IE8 and Chrome, Processes Are the New Threads

Posted by kdawson on from the keeping-intel's-margins-healthy dept.

SenFo writes "To many of the people who downloaded Google Chrome last week, it was a surprise to observe that each opened tab runs in a separate process rather than a separate thread. Scott Hanselman, Lead Program Manager at Microsoft, discusses some of the benefits of running in separate processes as opposed to separate threads. A quote: 'Ah! But they're slow! They're slow to start up, and they are slow to communicate between, right? Well, kind of, not really anymore.'"

6 of 397 comments (clear)

  1. Processes by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Running each instance in a seperate process is NOT new technology, hell, any n00b who knows what JCreator is has seen that option before(see this comment I posted awhile back).

    Increases in computing power have made insignificant the perceived sluggishness of running multiple processes -- if Chrome won't run smoothly on that Pentium 2 of yours, then perhaps you should install command-line linux anyway! :)

    Regarding Chrome, check out this response to my comment I linked to above, posted on June 30. At the time, I thought it was just an extension of a good idea but since his comment was posted earlier than Chrome was released I'm beginning to wonder if that fellow had any inside knowledge...

    [/tinfoil hat]

    1. Re:Processes by firefly4f4 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I can count on one hand the number of times I've had a problem with Firefox that would have been solved by it being in its own process.

      Possibly you can, but the biggest one I can count is having a flash plug-in (or similar) crash the entire browser when there's only a problem on one tab. That happens more frequently than I'd care for, so if there was a change that only brought down one tab, that would be great.

    2. Re:Processes by Johnno74 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Ahh .net threads are regular win32 threads. They are scheduled by the OS, not the runtime. .Net code is (well, can be...) much, much more robust than c++ code as its managed, and type conversion errors, null references and other things can be caught and recovered from more gracefully than C++. This applies to Java too, of course.

    3. Re:Processes by Chrisje · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The funny thing is that I'm working on a shiny new HP 6910p laptop. The kind with ~6 hrs battery life, a good deal of memory, a fast CPU and even a decent GPU. Everyone goes on and on about how the "cost" to start different processes all the time is no longer significant, but I really noticed the difference. I run FireFox 3 with a whole bunch of plug-ins and a nice skin. That contraption, in spite of the plug-ins, feels quite a bit faster than the Chrome browser does out of the box. I've tested Chrome yesterday, and at the end of 6 hours of work (in which everything did work off the bat, even starting my Citrix apps from a web portal, kudos to that) I concluded that firefox feels leaner and meaner, and went back to it.

      One of the major gripes I have is that it feels like FireFox is much quicker with regards to my proxy. We run a proxy configuration script which gives us different settings depending on which office we're in, and in Firefox I never notice the damn thing running. Now in Chrome, whenever I open a new tab, I see the damn thing executing. New process, sandbagging (or whatever you call it)... bah, humbug. I agree with the parent poster. I can count the times when that would have come in handy on the fingers of one hand after 3 versions of firefox on my system, and it makes the experience noticeably slower.

      Cut a long story short: I appreciate it's a beta. Come release time I'll give it another whirr. But right now, I don't see what the big hubbub is about save the fact there's another Open Source competitor on the market, which is always good. What is funny is that when you de-install Chrome, a dialogue pops up asking "Are you sure you want to uninstall Google Chrome? - Was it something we said?"

  2. Re:Deja vu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Windows people never really understood processes, they cannot distinguish them from programs (look at CreateProcess). They traditionally don't have cheap processes and abuse threads.

    In Linux we have NPTL now so there is a robust threads implementation if you need it. I don't thing processes are "superior" to threads (processes sharing their address space) or the other way round. They are for different purposes. If you need different operations sharing a lot of data go for threads I would say.

  3. quite ironic by speedtux · · Score: 4, Interesting

    UNIX didn't have threads for many years because its developers thought that processes were a better choice. Then, a whole bunch of people coming from other systems pushed for threads to be added to UNIX, and they did. Now, 30 years later, people are moving back to the processes-are-better view that UNIX originally was pushing.

    Microsoft and Apple have moved to X11-like window systems, Microsoft and Google are moving from threads to processes, ... Maybe it's time to switch to V7 (or Plan 9)? :-)