Linux spirits crawling in chrome
There’s been tons of reviews on chrome, literaly minutes from its release and the news was full. One thing I noticed that I didn’t see anyone talking is the several chrome processes simultaneously running.
After some testing I realized that its using the same stability principles used in unix programs i.e. separate different jobs in different spawned processes. In case any of them crashes, the rest will still live. In case of chrome each processes is responsible for a tab. This defends against badly written javascript pages. Just in case you open a page with bad JS and it hangs, this shouldn’t hang the rest of the tabs.
I also did some testing using process explorer, and found that the parent process also seems to be responsible for a tab. If that tab hangs and you kill it, then all of child processes responsible for the rest of the tabs will die as well.
I haven’t seen programs designed to run under windows and using a multiprocess model to enhance its stability before. I didn’t look in the source code, but it seems that there’s a lot of consideration taken in its design process.
Tags: chrome browser internet google