I've used cpulimit to "throttle" out-of-control CPU hungry programs before (Xfce4 Mailwatch Plugin gets hung up & grabs 100% CPU sometimes). cpulimit is a:
tool for limiting the CPU usage of a process
<p>cpulimit is a simple program that attempts to limit the CPU usage of a process (expressed in percentage, not in CPU time). This is useful to control batch jobs, when you don't want them to eat too much CPU. It does not act on the nice value or other priority stuff, but on the real CPU usage.<br>
Besides it is able to adapt itself to the overall system load, dynamically and quickly. </p>
It works by monitoring the target process, and sending "the SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signals to a process, both to verify that it can control it and to limit the average amount of CPU it consumes." See:
It should make the rest of your OS more responsive, but I've tried it on Firefox and it tends to render it much less responsive, so may not be the best answer for the Chrome browser. Searching for ways to speed up Chrome itself might be more fruitful.
If you just want a good way to see how much CPU & RAM is in use, and what processes are using them, I'd suggest a system monitoring program (like top, htop, I prefer conky), then when you see something eating all your cpu or ram you can close/restart, etc.
If you're interested in knowing what programs get scheduled to run first, look into scheduling priority & "niceness". Perhaps you could make Chrome act "nicer" without crippling it.
Here's a clip from info coreutils 'nice invocation':
'nice' prints a process's "niceness", or runs a command with modified
niceness. "niceness" affects how favorably the process is scheduled in
the system.
<p>Niceness values range at least from -20 (process has high priority
and gets more resources, thus slowing down other processes) through 19
(process has lower priority and runs slowly itself, but has less impact
on the speed of other running processes). Some systems may have a
wider range of niceness values; conversely, other systems may enforce
more restrictive limits. An attempt to set the niceness outside the
supported range is treated as an attempt to use the minimum or maximum
supported value.</p>
<p>A niceness should not be confused with a scheduling priority, which
lets applications determine the order in which threads are scheduled to
run. Unlike a priority, a niceness is merely advice to the scheduler,
which the scheduler is free to ignore. Also, as a point of
terminology, POSIX defines the behavior of 'nice' in terms of a "nice
value", which is the nonnegative difference between a niceness and the
minimum niceness. Though 'nice' conforms to POSIX, its documentation
and diagnostics use the term "niceness" for compatibility with
historical practice.</p>
And here are a few useful-looking links about scheduling
And muru's comment/post on Cgroups (on ArchWiki) looks good, about limiting ram, looks like it could limit CPU cores & "shares" too ("By default all groups have 1024 shares. A group with 100 shares will get a ~10% portion of the CPU time").
The first paragraph of the ArchWiki article also mentions this potentially useful option, though I think they're mainly for limiting users/groups, see:man pam_limits & man limits.conf
