A new post on the official blog page explains that Chrome recently has received a handful of performance adjustments. These improvements address Chrome’s speed, memory usage, and that thing it likes to do where it slows or hangs when you try to shut down. Faster searching comes by way of Chrome’s Omnibox (i.e., the address bar), which auto-suggests your search term while you’re typing it. Now, in addition to attempting to autocomplete your search queries, it attempts to pre-fetch search results based on how likely they are to be selected. These improvements make it possible to find what you’re looking for before you even finish typing it out. Browsing has received a boost through Chrome’s PartitionAlloc memory allocator, which has reduced overall memory use and increased performance. According to Google, this has resulted in up to a 20% reduction in browser memory use and improved performance for single and multi-tab use. Fixing the fairly regular shutdown hangs seems to have been a matter of caching—or rather, not caching. It appears the culprit was a design idea from years ago involving a local cache intended to make startup faster. This cache ended up wasting memory and was the main contributor to the shutdown hang problem. Now the cache has been removed, resulting in far fewer issues when you shut everything down. All of these adjustments should be available for Chrome now, with the team hinting at even more performance improvements planned for sometime in the future.
