[Music]
Welcome to the Grok Shop! In this video I
wanted to talk a little about Gargantua.
I mean, Google Chrome, and it's insatiable
appetite for your valuable computer and
network resources. If you're a regular
viewer of my channel you'll know I often
recommend considering other browsers
like Pale Moon just because a lot of
them are more lightweight than Google
Chrome. But in some cases you might find
that you need Chrome because it might be
the only browser that does everything
that you want, need and love in a
browser; and if so if you run a lot of
tabs in your browser's, if you leave a
lot of tabs open in the background, you
may eventually notice your computer
slowing down. So one possible solution is
to sort of manually check out the
websites and the associated processes in
Chrome that are using up a lot of
resources. So if you go to the details
tab in task manager in Windows (and by
the way you can add fields in here if
you right click on the column heading
and select columns. I like to have CPU
time because you can see the cumulative
time that's been used by individual
tasks and processes). So then you can sort
by CPU time to see who the bad actors
have been lately. Here you can see I've
got several Chrome processes sitting at
the top of the heap; not at the very top
but sitting way up there using a lot of
CPU. So we can combine the information
in task manager with the task manager
of Chrome (which if you hit shift escape
will open that up) and you'll see there
is a process ID for the various tasks
and we can link these two things
together, but you can see the additional
information like which website each
process is associated with. So here at
the top I have - looks like YouTube
analytics - using a gig - a gigabyte(!) of
memory which is just insane, and then you
can see the process ID here is 3212
and using that information we
can go back to the task manager and find
that process - there it is - and so in this
way we can link these two tools together
to gain the information we need to
figure out what the problem tabs are. So
like here we can see I have Google
Calendar using 577 megabytes of RAM and
using that process ID I can find the
same process here in task manager and of
course I could kill this process - I could
right-click it and end it - or I could go
to that tab in Chrome and close the tab
but of course you'll just need to go
right back there at some point. So what's
the solution? Well one possible solution
is you can delete cookies, cache and data
for the problem sites and that'll tend
to help reduce the resource usage for a
while but eventually, over time, you'll
find yourself right back in the same
boat. A more sustainable, long term
solution I've been using is to use the
Chrome extension "The Great Suspender." So
if you click on apps - the little rainbow
Rubik's Cube thing - there and then click
on Web Store and then in "search the
store" just type "great suspender." I think
you should see the great suspender at
the top there. Just click "Add to Chrome",
confirm that, and when it's done it
should take you to the great suspender
settings page. So this extension is
actually really simple: all that does is
put tabs to sleep that you're not using.
And by putting those tabs to sleep it's
gonna save you tons of resources. The
most important setting's right at the top
and that's how long it'll wait before
putting a tab to sleep after you stop
using that tab. To me, the one hour
default - that's kind of long. I usually
set mine to like 30 minutes. The rest of
the settings here they're really more
preference - how you like to roll; like
"never suspend pinned tabs" - I don't use pinned
tabs, so it doesn't affect me.
"Never suspend tabs that contain unsaved
form inputs" - I would definitely leave
that checked; I think that could be
helpful if you don't finish something up
you need to get back to it. "Never suspend
tabs that are playing audio" - yeah if you
use audio in the background from a tab.
"Never suspend active tabs in each window"
- again it's just your preference. If you
happen to have a site that always needs
to be on, or if you know some sites that
are just really cool, lightweight, don't
use a lot of resources, like say
- oh I don't know -
grokshop.tv - you can whitelist them
by putting them in this field here. Once
the tab's suspended, by default - to get it
unsuspended, you have to click on the
page. If you don't like that behavior, you
can tick this box here; it'll
automatically be unsuspended when you go
there so when a tab gets suspended all
of the memory is not freed up, but if you
tick this box
it'll free up more memory but then it'll
be slower to restart the tab. So you may
have to experiment with this to see if
it's something you like. Next you have a
theme choice which is always nice. Next
for suspended tabs, instead of seeing a
blank page that you click to unsuspend
the tab, it'll capture a screen cap of how
the tab looked before it was suspended,
but that looks like it uses a lot of CPU
so I am not using that. Next "add the
great suspender to the right-click
context menu" - I really like this feature.
So when you right-click you can see it
in here and there's all these immediate
actions you can take like "suspend this
tab", "unsuspended this tab", "whitelist this
domain" or "whitelist this URL" and "put all
tabs to sleep" and that type of thing.
It's a really cool feature to have; I
like it a lot. A couple more features are
the sync with your Google Chrome profile
feature if you use that and then there's
also a feature to automatically suspend
everything if the memory gets very low.
so as you can see this extension has a
lot of flexibility but for the most part
the defaults are fine. So if you don't
want to mess with all the settings you
can probably just accept the defaults
and then go tweak it as desired if you
find something you don't like.
So now just for the sake of illustration
I'm going to set the timer to 20 seconds
and we'll see what effect it has on the
resources on this computer. So first of
all, I'll go ahead and set the task manager up
so we can see the resources that get
reclaimed as they're reclaimed. I am
speeding up the video just a touch here.
So we can tell when it's has been
suspended because what it does is that
it will fade the icon - the little fav icon
and the text will sort of get washed out.
And here we go - we can see it's starting
to suspend the tabs now.
So now back in the task manager, we can
see on the details tab that the
resources, the CPU and the memory usage
is starting to drop off, but if we go to
the performance tab we can sort of
visually see as the memory is being
reclaimed and the CPU. Nice downward
sloping chart there for the memory and
of course we can see our available RAM
climbing up as the memory use goes down.
From the little thumbnails in the left
column there we can also see the Ethernet
usage is dropping off because a lot of
tabs - even when you're not doing
something - they're talking to api's and
using up your bandwidth. OK, last point I
wanted to make - if you need to get back
to your settings look for this little
icon - the app extension icon - click it, go
to settings and you're all set. So there
you go; it's not the end-all be-all but
you can clearly see - a very useful tool
to have in your toolkit to fight the
bloat, in this case - browser bloat. I would
definitely recommend in this extension
if you work like I do where you have a
lot of tabs open, you're multitasking,
you're working on one tab you need to go
work on another and then you got to come
back and work on that again. Just having
one or two tabs open and closing them
and reopening them it's just not really
a tractable way to work, right? So that's
it for this video guys. I hope you found
it helpful.
If you did, be sure to thumbs me up or
give me a comment. Be sure to stay tuned
for more videos on how to "Fight the
Bloat", because this is one of my favorite
topics. That's how it's done. Thanks for
watching.
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