Why so heavy disk I/O ?

**crystalfire** · 09-11-2008, 01:23 PM

Hello, I am a happy Chinese chrome user (sorry for my bad English).
But, I am afraid I cant be happy any more. It all starts from this article.

you can see this search result here.

In just a few days, this article has be quoted hundreds of times on many different chinese forums, blogs and big IT sites. and the comments are nearly one-sided: google is doing something really bad.
Its in Chinese. But I will explain it in short.

generally this passage's saying that chrome is planing something bad on your computer cauz it's secretly scanning your hard disk,
their evidence is chrome's "surprisingly heavy" disk I/O traffic. and concerning the fact that chrome has frequent ssl-encrypted out-bound connections. the author concluded that chrome is probably searching for some private date through users' hard disk and sent the results back to google server.

here is its "evidence"
image name/ CPU/ memory usage/ virtual mem/ thread/ IO read byte/ ...

Its possible that this article is from chrome's competitors and is spread intentionally. Such phenomenon is not rare in Chinese software industry.
anyway I think google should clarify this. and improve Chrome's Disk performance.

of course, I dont believe the craps at first. but I begin to notice that the hard disk indicator is really blink quite often.
I am wondering why is chrome biting my disk? any way to stop this?
hehe, you know, what i really worry about is the lifespan of my disk.

please shed some light,thanks
regards

**Chrome** · 09-11-2008, 01:38 PM

Could you try these 2 steps for me please:

1) Open Google Chrome

2) Go to your Task Manager and End the process Googleupdate.exe

Then check your disk I/O tool and tell me if it decreases?

That is quite a lot of disk activity, far too much actually.

**crystalfire** · 09-11-2008, 01:54 PM

hi chrome.
thanks for replying. I launched my process explorer just now. and founded that googleupdater.exe doesnt have much disk I/O traffic. anyhow I killed it. but chrome's disk I/O traffic seems still increasing fast. any suggestion?
BTW, the screen shot is not mine, its from the "popular" article i mentioned.
edit

sorry for the chaotic tense, its my weak point.)

**yasir01** · 09-11-2008, 02:12 PM

I am running single instance of chrome but check out the I/O and Write activity

**Chrome** · 09-11-2008, 02:19 PM

Let me look in to this some more, Chrome does have a fair bit of network activity and i'm not sure what it is for. For example this is my network traffic from Chrome over a 5 minute period and this was while Chrome was not loading pages.

One outbound connection is to a page that says HitboxGateway9.3.6-rc1 at the domain http://wm.xilinx.com

40,000 bytes to 4 separate IP addresses without loading a page is excessive.

I will need to find a tool that will show what sectors of the disk are being accessed by a particular program, this way i can find out "what" Chrome is trying to read. If anyone knows of such a tool please let me know.

I must admit it is quite strange how much network traffic is going over Chrome and how much it is reading the disk.

Let me look in to this a bit more.

**Chrome** · 09-11-2008, 02:23 PM

Originally Posted by yasir01

I am running single instance of chrome but check out the I/O and Write activity

The high write activity "may" be due to DNS Prefetching, this fetches the various DNS info and would need to store/write it. But that's still very high for simply prefetching.

**crystalfire** · 09-11-2008, 02:32 PM

Hello, I have some findings too.
the monitor summary seems to be suggesting that Chrome has a really resource hogging history management.
PS: googlepinyin is my chinese input method.

**mihaj** · 09-12-2008, 09:11 AM

Originally Posted by Chrome

I will need to find a tool that will show what sectors of the disk are being accessed by a particular program, this way i can find out "what" Chrome is trying to read. If anyone knows of such a tool please let me know.

Try Filemon, from Rusinovich. This might help you. He has many great tools

Regards, Miha

**Chrome** · 09-14-2008, 01:34 AM

Thanks Miha, that's exactly the one i was looking for.

Also sorry i have not replied to this sooner, i have moved Chrome Plugins to a new and much faster server so i lost a day setting all that up. The site stayed online the whole time, so with zero downtime i'd say nobody noticed.

Ok i have been digging in to Chrome and the disk I/O a bit more, and so far this is what i have come up with:

Every 30 minutes Chrome downloads a list of 32 bit URL hashes of sites/pages that are identified as Malware or Phishing type sites. This gets written to:

/Chrome/User Data/Safe Browsing

The size of the file will generally be around 55.6MB, and at present a lot of this file seems to be regenerated on every Malware update (30 minutes). So as others have shown Chrome hits the disk a "lot" and this also amounts to a lot of transfer/bandwidth usage.

So.. While switching off security is generally never a good idea, you can switch this off if you feel comfortable doing so.

Click the Wrench Icon >> Under The Hood >> Uncheck "Enable Phishing and Malware Protection"

This should prevent Chrome from hitting the disk so hard, not to mention save you a ton of bandwidth usage every month.

Let me know how that goes.

**crystalfire** · 09-15-2008, 04:46 AM

Hello chrome.
glad to see you back. I think there must be a bug in Chrome's anti-phishing mechanism for firefox has the same "32-bit hash database+ 256-bit hash check" url checking system. but firefox did a lot better. not many people complain about firefox's disk performance.

another thing is that I used a similar tool process monitor , and found that after disabling the safe browsing, chrome still reads one file on the disk ten times more frequently causing more I/O operations than any other cache file.

the file is named history index. i doubt if this is really necessary. please give it a look. and tell me if there is any way to stop this. thanks

regards

LinkBack

Thread Tools

Display

Why so heavy disk I/O ?

Why so heavy disk I/O ? - same issue here as well

Posting Permissions