Chromium with ~20 opened tabs freezes the laptop

chromefreezegentoognomehard-disk

When I have about 20 opened tabs of Chromium I see the hard disk starts writing and everything start to freeze. I have to 'killall' Chromium.
Previously I had installed google-chrome and the same was happening.
Is it normal or it could be a bug?
Someone experienced the same?

My laptop is a Acer Aspire E1-571G with i5 processor 2.6GHz 8GB ram.
gentoo distro with gnome as graphical system

UPDATE:
a big shame on me because I found out I didn't activate HIGHMEM64 config on my kernel (I don't know why) so I was running with ~2 Gb of ram instead of 8..

Best Answer

Maybe you're overloading the browser disk cache. You've got enough RAM for you to use some of the available RAM to give your browser cache some help. In Firefox you can do this by typing about:config in the address bar and then modifying the entry for browser.cache.memory.max_entry_size to a higher number such as 512000.

This is one of the reasons why I prefer Firefox to Chromium. I frequently have 20 or more tabs open in Firefox at the same time, but my Firefox never buckles under pressure.

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