Do remember to clear out your Chromium profile once in a while!

[Wowfunhappy]

For the past few days, I've been getting weird freezes in Chromium Legacy. I wanted to make a bug report, but I couldn't seem to capture any useful information—nothing getting logged in the console (OS X's in Chromium's), no consistent reproduction steps, etc.

I could have started digging into lldb (and a few reading this may be disappointed I did not), but instead I decided to try deleting ~/Application Support/Chromium and start fresh. After all, I've been using Chromium on this machine for a solid 2 years, so my profile had likely built up a substantial amount of cruft.

Not only are the freezes gone, but Chromium is noticeably snappier in general! Yes, I had to go back and re-add my extensions and app shortcuts, and I'm slowly logging back into websites (using a password manager like Bitwarden helps immensely!), but it's worth it.

Even computers running mainline Chrome would likely benefit from a fresh start like this every so often, but let's face it, Chromium Legacy is always going to be a bit more finicky than upstream, so for Chromium Legacy users this is especially important! Don't go nuts deleting your data every month, but once every year or so is probably a good idea!

[krackers]

Before that you could also try using chrome with a fresh profile for a few days, and if the issues disappear then go ahead and nuke the profile.

I think the issue is likely worse when you're using canary builds though as they may modify the profile in unexpected ways and probably less testing is done on the canaries for forwards+backwards compatibility of profiles.

[Wowfunhappy]

The reason I didn't save the old profile is I was concerned about freaking out website authentication/fingerprinting systems if I reverted the old profile several days later. I don't know if that was a valid concern or not.

[krackers]

Thinking about this more, it might be due to chrome field trials. Not sure about unofficial builds, but official ones will randomly decide to enroll you in "field trials" which can change the behavior of things. There are many flags enabled via field trials that are not even listed in about:flags. The only way to find them is to dig through the chrome source code. Resetting your profile probably resetting the field trials you had been automatically opted into.

I remember documenting this years ago, so here's what I jotted down:

https://textslashplain.com/2017/10/18/chrome-field-trials/
https://textslashplain.com/2019/07/16/updating-browsers-quickly-flags-respins-and-components/

chrome://version/?show-variations-cmd

allows you to list the field trials currently enabled. There will be a --force-fieldtrials command in there which allows you to control the set you are enrolled in. There is also --disable-field-trial-config, --variations-server-url, --fake-variations-channel, --reset-variation-state , --variations-insecure-server-url all of which can be used to control things

[Wowfunhappy]

That's good to know, I'll try that next time I have problems.

However, I do really think that nuking the whole profile (clearing the history, cookies, font cache, whatever else) helped immensely in general. I also haven't had any io_thread crashes (#44) since the clear out. Those have always been sporadic, and it has only been a couple of days, so it might be meaningless... but thinking back, I definitely got more and more of those over time as I kept using Chromium Legacy. The bug has something to do with the file system, so it makes sense that deleting all the files would help.

I also haven't experienced any tab crashes since the clear out. Again, it has only been two days, but...

[krackers]

@Wowfunhappy Do you know a way to effectively clear out profiles without losing your extension data. I've got a ton of configured extensions, most of which I made myself and didn't really make a way to export data from (i.e. they just chuck prefs in local storage, usually configured via devtools console). I wonder if I can just copy over the various dbs for local storage, dbs, and local extension settings?

Edit: Also I guess one option is to run with --user-profile-dir pointing to a clean one so you can verify whether or not it is in fact a profile issue.

[Wowfunhappy]

I've got a ton of configured extensions, most of which I made myself and didn't really make a way to export data from (i.e. they just chuck prefs in local storage, usually configured via devtools console).

Random thought I had this morning, could you potentially use https://github.com/FrigadeHQ/remote-storage in your extensions? The code snippets make it look exceedingly low-effort.

[krackers]

Looks interesting but I don't use npm, is there a standalone JS file I can just chuck somewhere?

[Wowfunhappy]

Update for 2024: this continues to be unreasonably effective.

I unintentionally ended up needing to delete my profile due to #212. The improvement is so noticeable that I'm not even upset.