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I am using chrome Version 50.0.2661.94 (64-bit) and ubuntu 16.04. Most of the time chrome get stuck and hangs whole system.

Does anyone face the same issue?

Gautam Savaliya
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    Do you have at least 4GB of RAM? If not, do not use Chrome. – dadexix86 May 01 '16 at 17:03
  • @dadexix86 I have 4GB RAM – Gautam Savaliya May 01 '16 at 17:06
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    I am seeing this as well, doesn't appear to be bogging down CPU or RAM so not sure why – jdwiegman May 03 '16 at 00:00
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    On my old laptop with 4GB of RAM, Firefox runs quite a bit faster than Chrome does (chrome is almost unusably slow) –  May 03 '16 at 13:19
  • @NickWeinberg I noticed the same thing – Gautam Savaliya May 03 '16 at 16:04
  • I'm having the same issue, except it sometimes (though it seems less often) to also happen when Chrome isn't running. Apparently it's a problem with the kernel in 16.04. Not happy Jan. :( – Tamsyn Michael May 06 '16 at 06:55
  • Same story here, with nvidia 361.42 latest Chrome would lock up for few seconds from time to time but this only happens to particular sites. – Arup Roy Chowdhury Jun 14 '16 at 16:43
  • I too have the issue. But it's with unity only. I've installed mate and when running chrome from mate, it works fine for me. – Aneeez Jan 04 '17 at 06:04
  • I have posted my DIY solution here: http://askubuntu.com/a/888742/600011 – Kris Jace Mar 02 '17 at 08:18
  • This happens for me as well, the HD blink light goes crazy, and I just have to wait 2-10min for it to stop. It will happen when I open a new tab at random when I've already had a bunch of tabs open. If I notice it and close the tab before it entirely slows down, it can be prevented, then I go to tab task manager and kill a few windows that I'll get back to later and I can open a new tab again. I have 16gb ram and a LOT of tabs – phazei Mar 23 '17 at 17:31

5 Answers5

88

Yeah, I faced the same issue. After a long struggle I solved it.
It's to do with the high memory(RAM) usage by Chrome.

  1. Disable hardware acceleration in chrome settings

    Steps:

    • Type "chrome://settings" in the URL bar, and then click "Advanced"
    • Untick "use hardware acceleration when available"

enter image description here

  1. Disable GPU Rasterization

    • Go to "chrome://flags"

    • Disable "GPU Rasterization"

      enter image description here

  2. Check how Chrome uses memory (Shift + Escape) (OPTIONAL)
    Extensions uses more memory too. If you find high memory usage in extensions (Adblockers are memory hogs), remove them too. That would help.

These would reduce the memory usage significantly.

Nusry
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  • This seem works, the "GPU Rasterization" reduce memory by ~ 50% – hiennt Mar 22 '17 at 01:38
  • GPU Rasterization is a nice idea – kodmanyagha May 16 '17 at 11:24
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    For me "Disable hardware acceleration" and "Disable GPU Rasterization" resolved the problem. – rmuller Jan 07 '18 at 19:02
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    This is not a solution, just a workaround. By disabling hardware acceleration, tasks like video reproduction will rely solely on the CPU. Hardware acceleration should just work. – Fran Marzoa Mar 19 '18 at 22:09
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    Didn't help me. Chrome still freezes from time to time on Ubuntu 18.10 – Peter Jan 06 '19 at 01:27
  • "Disable hardware acceleration" appears to have helped a lot on my box so far. This morning I had near-lockups when opening two slack tabs and a few other overblown things like recipes (they make those pages monsters these days), and no freezes or slowdowns of the system, just slow painting of the individual page. Xubuntu 18.04 on a Dell chromebook with 4GB RAM. Who knows why it helps, probably buggy hardware acceleration. I have plenty of swap, that wasn't it. – Tom Boutell May 15 '20 at 11:54
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    @TomBoutell It's not buggy harware acceleration. Hardware acceleration offloads some of the CPU work to other hardware (i.e. the GPU). So that the CPU utilisation is low, but in turn this takes up more memory, resulting in poor performance in your case of a 4GB RAM. So disabling Harware acceleration gives all the task to the CPU so you will have more memory to work with. – Nusry May 18 '20 at 01:46
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    oh thx, it was killing me. this works for Ubuntu 18.04 on VirtualBox too – aiternal Jun 16 '20 at 11:40
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    Chrome was constantly freezing my Ubuntu. After your tip, everything is running perfectly ... Thanks! – Cleberson Falk Jun 30 '20 at 19:38
  • Is there an official bug report for this? The problem still exists in 20.04. – Simd Oct 04 '20 at 19:57
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    Some much time save dude ! Thank you for the debugging ! – Adrien Forbu Aug 29 '21 at 06:19
24

How about disabling GPU hardware acceleration ?

If you run Chrome with "--disable-gpu" from within a terminal :

google-chrome --disable-gpu

Did you try that trick ?

If it runs ok, you may then persist that behavior by going to Chrome's settings / "System", uncheck the "use hardware acceleration when available", and restart afterwards.

Steph V.
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  • I'm having a similar issue (some sites hang, ie gmail). I unchecked "Use hardware acceleration when available" in settings, but I still see freezes. – Rafael Sisto Nov 07 '16 at 13:12
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    Didn't help or may not be the solution – L.K. Sep 06 '17 at 08:46
  • I experienced the best performance / stability improvement from this. – user3751385 Mar 05 '18 at 05:23
  • This works. I have dual 4k screens, 4 CPUs and integrated HD530 graphics, and it goes from frequently unusable, to choppier but usable. Can anyone explain WHY though? Where's the bottleneck? – stevesliva Mar 13 '18 at 18:01
  • Very good workaround even in 2024 with Linux Mint 21 and Chrome 120. Fixes Google Chrome freezing problems under certain circumstances, such as after switching from the desktop (CTRL+ALT+F7) to a virtual console (CTRL+ALT+F[1-6]) and vice versa. – Francesco Galgani Jan 12 '24 at 07:35
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I have a Nvidia GPU and I use version 16.04 stable. Before I have irreversible freezes about every 3-4 hours, even without using Chrome. After I installed the Nvidia 358.16 drivers, everything seems to go ok.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-358 nvidia-settings
DarioLap
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3

It was the same here yesterday, when I added a swap partition and the problem was gone. I don't want a swap partition but what the heck I guess I will just have to get over those 8gigs of drive space :)

Community
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Revolutionist
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  • You not necessarily need the equivalent of your RAM as a swap partition, usually in the case you need one 1 Gig should be enough for almost anything. – Videonauth Dec 20 '16 at 15:29
  • i have no idea why this would've worked, but after trying all other solutions on Ubuntu 17.04, this was the one that did it. – Brandon Apr 17 '17 at 19:03
  • Upgraded to 17.04 (from 16.10 and 16.04) on NTB with SSD and 16G of mem, added swap and will see if it will fix the frezes... not a best solution for SSD though... :- – LetynSOFT Apr 30 '17 at 21:08
  • vote me up if it worked for you @Brandon – Revolutionist May 07 '17 at 10:15
  • @LetynSOFT offtopic, but SSDs have improved a lot on durability since the firsts units. If you google a bit, there is a test done by Google themselves on their data centers that found out that they have to replace HDDs more frenquently than SSDs for the same load of transactions. So you shouldn't concern about that. – Fran Marzoa Mar 19 '18 at 22:15
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For Ubuntu 20.04, if after opening Gmail Chrome freezes totally, it may be due to dark mode.

DISABLE DARK MODE

or

google-chrome --disable-gpu
Eric Carvalho
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Shah Vipul
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