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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

My personal (probably non-representative) experience with ChromeOS vs. Android: my ChromeOS device (a Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 2-in-1 Chromebook) tends to get extremely unresponsive (i.e. hangs itself up for minutes before responding again, or just spontaneously reboots) the longer it runs without being rebooted, to the point that I eventually have to hard reset it after about a week of on-and-off use. I basically only use the browser on it (but with lots of tabs open). This never happened to me on any of the many Android phones/tablets I had. Maybe it's some bug in how newer ChromeOS versions work on this by now pretty old device, but it's still annoying as hell...

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Gotta admit I'm curious there. I've rocked a rk3399 chromebook for years (stopped roughly when it got deprecated) without issues, and I was stressing it with crouton. My gf is still using a rk3288 chromebook "fine" (it's no longer her daily driver though). Those are low-end 8yo devices.

Anecdotal counter-point I have a colleague with a Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8" 2019 (SM-T290), and after just 3 years it became absolutely unusable, even after a factory reset. And it's "by design": it shipped with 2GB RAM, which was usable in Google/Android 9 (shipped OS), but just completely dead on Google/Android 11 (updated OS). Obviously I saved that device from oblivion with a Google-less Android that takes half as much RAM.

Are you by chance using external storage media such as USB or SD cards?

The bus on these older model chromebook devices had a choking issue where the kernel would fully saturate the transfer bus and cause a cgroup scheduling strategy to give full priority to the processes using the bus at the expense of the gui. Solutions to this problem include a new NVME or software level cgroup reconfiguration of the kernel to revert scheduling priority to equal across all cgroups.

Or it could be something else entirely, but last time i had this issue and bug hunted it the finding was as stated above.

I've been using Linux for a long time, including chromebooks, and this sounds like textbook low memory to me. I love linux, but it doesn't handle low memory situations well[1], and whatever Chrome does in low memory situations makes it much worse. Tab discipline is the most important thing you can do. I have an obscene amount of tabs open too so I feel you. I've started making liberal use of the Session Buddy extension and that is helpful, though my true fix was putting 128 GB of RAM in :-D

[1] This is improving greatly in the last year or two, but that probably wouldn't have made it to your chromebook.

EarlyOOM [1] could help with that quite a lot. Not to sure about using it on chromebooks, but linux got quite a bit more usable because of it.

[1] https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom

You could try disabling the Android system ("Google Play"), since they switched running Android in a VM in newer ChromeOS versions. So you have an Android VM running in the background all the time and that might overwhelm the small Mediathek processor in the Duet.

That's the irony of this announcement. The only problems I ever suffered on ChromeOS came from the Android subsystem.

I know your Duet problem well. I've got a Duet around here. It was slow from the beginning. Noticeably, it would often slow to a crawl while Chrome OS was downloading an update in the background. And sometimes, it would be slow after waking for about 5 to 10 minutes and then suddenly go to a more acceptable speed.

I also have a Lenovo Ideapad Chromebook running on an Intel 4020 with only 4GB. Despite being slow hardware, it runs circles around the Duet. The 4020 can be sluggish at times, but it never had the big slowdowns of the Duet. It could even run Visual Studio Code at acceptable speeds. Something was very wrong with the Duet. Usually Chrome OS is good on lower end hardware.

I had issues like that a few years back on memory starved Chromebooks, in my case the biggest savior was the Great Suspender/Discarder extension as I hoard tabs, otherwise the Android subsystem on a 4GB RAM machine is stretching it thin.

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