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I'm using Xubuntu 20.04 on a desktop PC with a Ryzen 2400g CPU and 2x8gb RAM but having just a few tabs open in chromium uses all of my CPU and more.

The fan on my PC goes in to overdrive and checking top shows the following:

enter image description here enter image description here

I use both FF and Chromium (both installed from snap) and with FF there are no such problems.

Anyone have any ideas why this is happening/how I can stop it?

enter image description here

Johnny5ive
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    I am not really sure why. It appears to have happened with the latest update - as I'm seeing similar behavior here on two different computers, each with the latest Chrome. I'd expect the next update to address this, though you may want to try reporting it. To be clear, this did not happen with the previous version. – KGIII Aug 30 '20 at 19:01
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    I've been having this same thing happen in Chrome, but it's more random. Sometimes I find that there's a runaway process that I can kill that doesn't close any of the tabs/windows I have open, so who knows what it was doing. – ajgringo619 Aug 30 '20 at 19:09
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    This seems like the beginning of a bug report. An example of runaway resource consumption that a developer can reliably duplicate in their test environment is how this kind of problem gets fixed. – user535733 Aug 30 '20 at 19:13
  • @KGIII now as you mention it, i've been using chromium for months and this only recently started happening. I guess i'll have to file a bug report as suggested. ajgringo619 - "what it was doing" was my thoughts exactly – Johnny5ive Aug 30 '20 at 20:20
  • Unfortunately in order to file a bug you require a gmail account to log in - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list. Typical google, what a joke. Unfortunately i'm not able to file a bug report. – Johnny5ive Aug 31 '20 at 10:16
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    Try using task manager of Chromium to get better info. – jarno Sep 07 '20 at 20:26
  • Thanks for the tip, it turns out it was a chinese website that I was visiting. If you submit that as an answer i'll mark it as correct. – Johnny5ive Sep 10 '20 at 15:51

2 Answers2

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Try using task manager (from More tools menu or by Shift+Esc) to see which tab is causing high CPU usage.

jarno
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  • Sorry, but after further testing it seems it wasnt a web resource and was in fact something to do with google. It happened a lot on many webpages. I've had to uninstall chromium there was no other option. I installed ungoogled chromium and the problem is 100% fixed... very low CPU usage – Johnny5ive Sep 21 '20 at 12:08
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After further testing, the problem was something to do with Chromium itself and not any web resources. The problem happened on many different wep pages and there was no apprent reason. CPU usage rose and stayed at 200% continuously.

The only solution was to uninstall Chromium and to install Ungoogled Chromium.

https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/

echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ungoogled_chromium/Ubuntu_Focal/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/home:ungoogled_chromium.list

curl -fsSL https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:ungoogled_chromium/Ubuntu_Focal/Release.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/home:ungoogled_chromium.gpg > /dev/null


sudo apt update


sudo apt install ungoogled-chromium

The problem is now fixed, Chromium uses little CPU:

enter image description here

Though I'm not going to mark this as the correct answer as it's not exactly a fix, but personally I think it's the best option

Johnny5ive
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  • But isn't chromium-browser ungoogled per se? Did you use google-chrome before, instead? You can get the former as snap package via official repository for Ubuntu 20.04. See also https://askubuntu.com/a/1206153/21005 – jarno Sep 22 '20 at 05:16
  • I'm not sure, but judging from the fact theres been an 'ungoogled' chromium created I presume not. I was using Chromium from snap previously. Edit: a lot of the google features are removed from 'Ungoogled': chrome store (can be brought back with: https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store), google translate, search etc etc. – Johnny5ive Sep 23 '20 at 11:02