Supermium on weak hardware, help me optimize performance.

[KoleckOLP]

I find this project amazing, I can't fathom how much work it had to be to get the latest chrome to run on Windows XP.

It got me excited and I tried it in a VM where I got good performance. (single core of an i7-10700)

But trying on real hardware is a diffrenet story, I'm not running out of ram it's using like ~600 mb but my cpu is pinned at 100% most of the time.
The PC I tried it on has a mobile Intel Celeron 530, and I would like to be able to get this browser to work on something even slower like an Intel Atom Z540.

What settings should I do inside supermium to get better performance, also what addons would you guys recommend that could spead up browsing and relieve the cpu stress.

[docrR]

Chromium is architecturally designed for dual-thread CPUs. There really isn't much you can do at all to curtail the issue of high CPU usage on sub 2-thread chips. The system requirements clearly indicate that 2 CPU threads is recommended to use the browser.

Provided you do have an adequate system on the lower end side of things, there are a number of things you can do to for an improved experience.

A solid content blocker like uBo will help trim the weight off of pages. You could go a step further and use something like Noscript and only whitelist sites you use regularly. This will cripple the pages, but lighten the load in a pinch. Idle tab unloaders are also quite useful. You may also use a Chrome web extension called Reader View that you can use to distill pages into a light-weight e-book style view for easy reading. This is mostly useful for viewing articles. For YouTube playback, you could force h.264 playback with an extension like h264ify, or go a step further and install Rehike (requires Apache and PHP).

All in all, there are measures you can take to lighten things up, but they aren't going to work miracles on systems that are simply incapable of running this application.

[JoachimHenze]

If you are working on "Supermium 122.0.6261.85 Hotfix (R2)" then you can slightly reduce the load on the OS by copying in the following dll: Latest progwrp.dll (version 1.1.0.5000)
https://github.com/win32ss/supermium/files/14752565/progwrp_32.zip
This will fix a giant handle-leak, which will help a bit with performance.

Next step:
cmdline param --in-process-gpu helps me a little bit with lowering RAM consumption, and makes it use only 7 instead of 8 processes right after startup. I do always use that here on Windows XP (where there is no HW accel, and therefore its stability impact is neglectible).

cmdline param --single-process may also help a bit on super weak hardware, but it is a double-edged sword. May increase instability and really will actually hurt the performance in case you have more powerful 2core hardware. But it's worth experimenting with it. Since --single-process on some machines makes the browser failing to even start, I do highly recommend to always only add one flag at a time. Verify, and only then continue with the next one.

Next step: Your hardware is really extremely weak. I doubt you would be very satisfied with the result you will get with Supermium, even with a bit of tweaking.
I would recommend you to have a look at NewMoon27 and NewMoon 28 browsers from roytam for your machine (Firefox/Palemoon-based).
NewMoon27 is a bit more optimized for very low-end machines than NewMoon28. But has weaker webcapabilities than NM28:
https://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/

Next: More lightweight than Supermium, but also based on Chrome you can find here:
https://github.com/Alex313031/chromium-xp
It's based on Chrome 49. But due to the lack of modern EllipticCurve-cryptos this will not open most pages on WinXP. It may be capable to open more pages when used on WindowsVista or Win7, as those do export those ciphers from the operating system.
This project could actually benefit a lot from supermiums SSL implementation (see Alex313031/chromium-xp#9 ) but its maintainer @Alex313031 does not seem to be very active unfotunately. If that would happen, then this would be a very good browser for your specific usecase. I would also have a lot of use for such a build personally.

Next: More lightweight approach would be Firefox 28, but that really can't browse a lot of sites anymore:
URLDownload = http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/28.0/win32/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%2028.0.exe
SHA1 = 0154f7a38acad5c186c000533f992830e509abee
SizeBytes = 25200168

The most radical, and unorthodox approach is
https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice
It will allow a faster computer that is running a modern browser-backend, to help an older computer to browse the internet.
This is most likely not what you seek for, but may be the only way for that old machine "accessing" the modern internet.

But yes, allowing Supermium to somewhat work on single core machines without those 100% CPU usage frenzies would be awesome.

[JoachimHenze]

@KoleckOLP you might want to retry "Supermium 122.0.6261.152 (R4)" plus cmdline option --single-process and --in-process-gpu and with the following file https://github.com/IDA-RE-things/Chrome-xp-api-adapter/releases/download/v1.2/chrome-xp-api-adapter_x86.zip
Rename the dll to progwrp.dll and replace the existing progwrp.dll with it.
That's the best I can suggest for now. For more tweaks of just minor impact you could have a look here D395comment