Speeding up Google Chrome in Linux

Google-chrome was getting slower and slower on my otherwise-performant-seeming EeePC laptop. Sometimes it would take 10 seconds to open a page. And, after opening a page, while further assets were loading, the browser would become unresponsive and Chrome would offer to kill them.

Why? Well, I'm running ubuntu karmic, with a luks-encrypted ext3 home directory on the EeePC's cheap SSD. Somewhere in that stack, I believe Chrome's disk cache writes were beginning to bog down, as evidenced by kcryptd's appearance in "top".

To prove that disk performance was the culprit, I copied ~/.cache to my ramdisk /tmp/ directory and symlinked it back to my home directory. This instantly made chrome feel faster than a flying potato.

So how do I get that level of performance while still storing my cache on a persistent storage medium? After mucking around in /proc/sys/vm/ for a while to no avail, I tried ext3's "data=writeback" option. Works like a charm. The occasional fsck seems like a small price to pay. And, of course, it speeds up every app on the machine -- not just Chrome. This is life-changing if you have a cheap SSD.

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