Why does Chromium run so slow in portable mode?

I am using Chromium on a flash drive through LiberKey and it does everything I want it to do as far as syncing my Chrome bookmarks from home, etc. But it's soooooo slow. If I open more than 1 tab, or if a tab is heavy with code such as Gmail or GMaps, then the entire program hangs for about 5-10 seconds.

I don't exactly know how portable apps work when run from a flash drive, so is there a way to speed up load times?

The computer I'm using here at work has a P4 3GHz CPU and 2GB of RAM. The flash drive is a SanDisk 2GB (probably 2-3 years old).

UPDATE: I downloaded and ran USBDeview after reading some about USB speeds. The drive transfers around 5 MB/s write and about 15 MB/s read. Would that be sufficient for my portable app speeds?

NoCatharsis

Posted 2010-04-23T16:12:59.713

Reputation: 2 797

Answers

As per the site

Performance Note: Google Chrome Portable may run slowly from some flash drives. You can speed this up by copying GoogleChromePortable.ini from the GoogleChromePortable\Other\Source directory to the GoogleChromePortable directory and editing it to set RunLocally=true. If you do so, be sure to allow Google Chrome Portable time to copy your profile back after shutting it down. Of course, there are privacy implications to copying your personal data locally to a PC not under your control.

Xeroxoid

Posted 2010-04-23T16:12:59.713

Reputation: 96

2You should post a link to the source of the quote. – bwDraco – 2012-11-28T15:26:40.070

It could be that your USB drive has slow read/write speeds. Or that the computer you are using is slow without sufficient RAM.

ctzdev

Posted 2010-04-23T16:12:59.713

Reputation: 2 320

Yeah it's not the most up-to-date computer they give us here in the office, but I thought this would be decent enough to run a browser from USB. Take a look at the stats I edited in and please let me know if you think that's definitely the issue. I keep the computer pretty clean and without many apps running since it's not a speed demon to begin with. Thanks a lot. – NoCatharsis – 2010-04-23T17:15:24.133

That computer should run just fine. Maybe the issue could be USB 1.0. – ctzdev – 2010-04-24T00:28:56.210

Hmm yeah - I honestly don't know a lot about when USB 2.0 became the standard, so maybe this desktop was manufactured before then? Would my only solution then be to add a USB 2.0 card to the computer? – NoCatharsis – 2010-04-29T03:14:04.717

I wouldnt do that just now. Unless ur desperate. I would get a USB 3.0 cad for the computer. – ctzdev – 2010-04-30T02:51:40.217

Note the update I made to the OP. See if that makes any difference. Thanks again. – NoCatharsis – 2010-05-04T01:33:30.167

Those speeds should be sufficient enough. – ctzdev – 2010-05-05T01:21:42.030