Nexus 5X Chrome Performance
Friday 4th December, 2015 11:48 Comments: 0
I've had my Nexus 5X for over month and it's a nice phone. It's definitely the spiritual successor to the Nexus 5 from a couple years ago, a reasonable size with a reasonable specification and reasonable price. I also like Marshmallow, and I'm quite happy with the general performance and battery life on the Nexus 5X (after having run all the M previews on my old Nexus 5, it doesn't seem any worse on the 5X). Despite the encryption, which is on by default, it seems to cope okay. This is possibly due to using an ARMv8 chip that accelerates AES and SHA.
However there appears to be one pretty big problem: the phone only comes with 2GB of RAM. For the most part this is okay, but there appears to be one application that needs far more than 2GB. An application I use on a daily basis. One that Google has created, which I imagine many Nexus 5X users will be using. It's Chrome Dev.
As you can probably tell from the screenshot above, in the last day Chrome Dev has needed 3GB of RAM at some point. The phone only has 2GB, and it probably needs to use some RAM for the operating system. I presume this means about half of Chrome Dev's RAM is paged to the filesystem, which uses relatively slow chips plus there's the overhead of encryption (about a 30% hit, I think?). I suspect this explains why Chrome will sometimes grind to a halt, causing the phone to lag really badly. So badly that it doesn't even recognise some interrupts.
Time to look into chrome://flags to see if there are any settings I can change to reduce RAM usage. If I can limit Chrome Dev to 1.5GB instead of letting it eat 3GB then perhaps I'll avoid some of the performance issues I'm seeing. Fingers crossed. Or I could go back to Chrome, which appears to be a 32-bit application and hopefully doesn't have any major bugs or regressions.
However there appears to be one pretty big problem: the phone only comes with 2GB of RAM. For the most part this is okay, but there appears to be one application that needs far more than 2GB. An application I use on a daily basis. One that Google has created, which I imagine many Nexus 5X users will be using. It's Chrome Dev.
As you can probably tell from the screenshot above, in the last day Chrome Dev has needed 3GB of RAM at some point. The phone only has 2GB, and it probably needs to use some RAM for the operating system. I presume this means about half of Chrome Dev's RAM is paged to the filesystem, which uses relatively slow chips plus there's the overhead of encryption (about a 30% hit, I think?). I suspect this explains why Chrome will sometimes grind to a halt, causing the phone to lag really badly. So badly that it doesn't even recognise some interrupts.
Time to look into chrome://flags to see if there are any settings I can change to reduce RAM usage. If I can limit Chrome Dev to 1.5GB instead of letting it eat 3GB then perhaps I'll avoid some of the performance issues I'm seeing. Fingers crossed. Or I could go back to Chrome, which appears to be a 32-bit application and hopefully doesn't have any major bugs or regressions.