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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.'"

3 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: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.