Google is working on making Chromebooks less slow at startup

At startup, some Chromebooks take a while to fully respond to user input. It may seem like a small issue, but this slowness is part of what makes Chromebooks feel like they’re a step up from other types of machines. But according to a post about Chromium Gerrit spotted this week by About Chromebook magazine, Google is working on a fix.

The lack of response is at least partly due to the virtual machine used to run Android apps on Chrome OS laptops (although limited memory on many Chromebooks can also contribute to the problem). It looks like the Android Runtime for Chrome Virtual Machine (ARCVM) may be bogging down the Chromebook’s CPU on first login. The commit blames ARCVM for consuming up to 300 percent (three cores x 100 percent) of CPU resources “for a few minutes. “

According to the fix, ARCVM “continuously consumes the [Chromebook] CPU for several minutes when the user logs in, before the user even launches any Android app or play store.”

The fix tries to solve the problem by throttling the VM “when it first goes into the background”so that it only uses 25 percent of the CPU. However, this figure may change.

“Once it moves to the front, the throttling is removed. Throttling never returns until the device is rebooted,” the commit says.

He also says the fix won’t slow ARCVM up because it won’t be throttled until it starts.

It’s unclear if we’ll see this fix in a Chrome OS update. Until then, patience is a virtue.