Question

i was checking my task manager and i found this
typically i thot that my browser runs as a single process with unique pid
but it has several instances with several pid's i dont think ther's a pid associated with every thread
so why are there so many process for a simple user
application?

Answer 1

those in the second column are pid's btw

Answer 2

First, browsers aren't "simple" user applications. All the stuff they do make them complex programs. That aside, it may be that this browser spawns a process for each window/tab.

Do you have any way to figure out if these processes are children of the lowest PID process?

Answer 3

sry can u please elaborate @rsmith6559

Answer 4

Rockmelt is based on Chromium, and Chromium is a multi-process browser, which is how it is designed. The processes you see here usually represent one or more tabs, try ending one of them and you will see errors on only a few tabs.

Answer 5

i m not concerned about rocket melt..
it's about an application say browser in general....
and say it had jus 2 tabs wen i took this snap shot

Answer 6

It's multi-process browser hence it assign the plugins, the gui thread, the main thread on every different process. It does so because of advantages of multi-threading and parallel-processing. By that it also allows you to kill the tab which is eating lot of cpu and memory rather than whole browser.

Answer 7

guess it l take a while for me to get this stuff

Answer 8

The easy way to test this is to quit the browser, leave Task Manager running, and restart the browser. Look at how many processes it has. Go to a web page, see how many there are now. Open a new tab, see how many there are now. Go to a page that you know has video and/or audio. Guess what you check now.

It can actually be a very interesting exercise.