Re: Chromium on Pi2

bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

Just for amusement I've been trying to run the chromium browser
on a Pi2. Obviously, it's slow, but it looks like the cpu isn't
busy at all, mostly idle with a few percent for system processes.
 
Right now it's stuck loading a page from the New York Times
website. The Pi2 itself is responsive, but the chromium window
seems totally stuck.

How much RAM? It sounds just like what happened when I recently
tried to run one of the new AARCH64 Firefox binaries now offered
by Mozilla on my Pi Zero 2 (512MB RAM). I could get as far as
starting to load a page (even a small, plain, webpage), but then
regardless of the settings it would always bog down and get stuck,
though other programs would still run (eg. 'top' showing only a
handful of MB of free RAM left).

The odd thing is that I ran Firefox on x86 with 512MB RAM a
couple of years ago and it wasn't nearly as bad.

I haven't run Chrom(ium) on anything for many years, but it sounds
like you've run into the same RAM barrier. One thing I didn't try
is making a swap partition on the SD card, because the I/O speed
through that will likely be even worse than swap on a HDD. But for
"amusement" it might get you a little further along (while wearing
your SD card out).

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