Force Chromium browser to use multiple processes

Question

Several people complained here about multiple Chromium browser processes, I seem to have opposite problem.

I want (if I did not misunderstood something) to force Chromium to use separate process for each page.

My case: I browse some news aggregator, Twitter or a page and open some links in other pages for later reading. I noticed that after opening multiple pages scrolling becomes extremely sluggish (at least on some pages) and responsiveness of browser drops so it becomes barely usable.

In Chromium's task manager I see that some processes have separate dot on the left while others are joined with thick line. See screenshot

The joined processes are those that I opened with Ctrl+Click or similar and are the ones whose pages are most sluggish. For example all tabs opened from Twitter are joined (including Twitter itself). I assume that those pages are all running in same process. I could not pinpoint rule for opening joined processes (sometimes Ctrl+Click does this sometimes opposite) - perhaps there's some internal heuristic for this. If I close a browser's window and reopen tabs with Ctrl+Shift+T the pages turn out to be separate and more responsive even after are all loaded.

I have 16GB of RAM so do not really care about memory consumption. My environment is Ubuntu 15.10 (Xubuntu, x64) but I think I've seen this behavior in previous versions. CPU is Intel i5 (2 cores, 4 threads, notebook).

Answer 1

Use the --process-per-tab commandline switch.

https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process-models#TOC-Process-per-tab