Chromium priority cycling

[kfeoktistoff]

Chromium is a multi-process browser and recently I have found that it manages its processes by itself. Depending on the purpose of the process Chromium applies a specific priority value. I have noticed values 0, 10, 19. Considering above, we have 2 problems:

1. Ananicy applies the same value to all Chromium processes regardless of their purpose
2. Both Chromium and Ananicy renice the processes one after another slowing down the whole system

You can check the logs in your system:

$ cat /var/log/syslog | grep "ananicy.*renice.*chromium" | head
<time> <host> ananicy[1211]: renice: chromium[166625/166625] 19 -> -3
<time> <host> ananicy[1211]: renice: chromium[166625/166627] 19 -> -3
<time> <host> ananicy[1211]: renice: chromium[166625/166628] 19 -> -3
<time> <host> ananicy[1211]: renice: chromium[166625/166629] 19 -> -3
<time> <host> ananicy[1211]: renice: chromium[166625/166633] 19 -> -3
<time> <host> ananicy[1211]: renice: chromium[166625/166635] 19 -> -3
<time> <host> ananicy[1211]: renice: chromium[166625/166676] 19 -> -3
<time> <host> ananicy[1211]: renice: chromium[166625/166680] 19 -> -3
<time> <host> ananicy[1211]: renice: chromium[166625/166681] 19 -> -3
<time> <host> ananicy[1211]: renice: chromium[166625/166682] 19 -> -3

As a short-term solution we can remove Chromium rules from Ananicy. As a long-term one I would recommend to consider a possibility of disabling the default rules.