Joe Edmonds Blog

Reducing Chrome Power Usage in Linux

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

I'm running ubuntu maverick on my ASUS U35F. It's got a couple problems (LCD screen viewing angle is right out of the 1990s, no nvidia graphics because they only offer the jury-rigged and linux-incompatible "Optimus", no CDROM drive -- I used to care about this; somebody remind me why) but it's fast & quiet, has plenty of RAM and hard drive space, and it has phenomenal battery life. Like you can use it during the whole flight ... to Korea.

That is, it will last the whole flight if you're careful. What's the best way to manage power usage in linux? Powertop. What causes the most problems for a web browser tab-addict like myself? Unsurprisingly, Adobe's flash player ("npviewer.bin") and the resource-hungry applets people create therein. So how do I track down the obscure pages where flash is doing nothing but wasting battery? (the AWS login page, anyone?!?) Press shift-escape to open chrome's awesome task manager, then scroll down to "Shockwave Flash" and click "End Process". Any tabs running flash get a little message bar at the top and battery usage falls to a tree-hugging 8-watts-or-so.

Speeding up Google Chrome in Linux

Sun, 30 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Google-chrome was getting slower and slower on my otherwise-performant-seeming EeePC laptop. Sometimes it would take 10 seconds to open a page. And, after opening a page, while further assets were loading, the browser would become unresponsive and Chrome would offer to kill them.

Why? Well, I'm running ubuntu karmic, with a luks-encrypted ext3 home directory on the EeePC's cheap SSD. Somewhere in that stack, I believe Chrome's disk cache writes were beginning to bog down, as evidenced by kcryptd's appearance in "top".

To prove that disk performance was the culprit, I copied ~/.cache to my ramdisk /tmp/ directory and symlinked it back to my home directory. This instantly made chrome feel faster than a flying potato.

So how do I get that level of performance while still storing my cache on a persistent storage medium? After mucking around in /proc/sys/vm/ for a while to no avail, I tried ext3's "data=writeback" option. Works like a charm. The occasional fsck seems like a small price to pay. And, of course, it speeds up every app on the machine -- not just Chrome. This is life-changing if you have a cheap SSD.

Epictetus Quotes

Fri, 28 May 2010 12:13:00 -0700

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

(just a couple of Epictus' many great quotes)

CrowdPhoto

Mon, 03 May 2010 00:43:00 -0700

Helped build CrowdPhoto this weekend at Startup Weekend LA.

What was fun for me: Doing another project with the talented "ShareMySpot" gang from last year's SWLA, attracting a couple developers willing to learn the Android platform (in 48 hours!) and able to launch the mobile app that makes CrowdPhoto push-button simple, learning about the power of realtime PR (Twitter), learning about Amazon SimpleDB, working with the new ubuntu "lucid" release, barbecue on the roof of an Ocean Ave apartment building, a third customer for filter.to, and meeting a bunch of smart people from the LA startup world.

CoLoft graciously hosted the event and sponsored a 1-month free membership for the 2nd-place team, so I look forward to taking advantage of that over the next 4 weeks!

ZipRecruiter

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:52:00 -0800

ZipRecruiter (previously named StarterView), is a new site we launched that helps hiring managers find candidates without spending a lot of money on recruiters. ZipRecruiter is already delivering value for its closed beta customers, so we figured it's time to open it up to the world. Come on by, create a free account, and start receiving qualified applicants in your inbox. We'd love to hear your feedback.