i.came.to.get.down

If you’re unsatisfied with how fast your current browser eats up all your memory, you should probably be running Mr. Leaky himself, chromium-browser. Luckily, he’s fast enough to make us forget about all that wasted memory. But what about profiles and storing our cache in ram? Read on!

First off, let’s install this bad boy:

echo "" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "#chromium" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu lucid main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu lucid main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 4E5E17B5
apt-get update  && apt-get install chromium-browser

Sweet! The following is my launcher script that enables profiles and moves the cache dir to ram:

#!/bin/bash
PROFILE=$1
if [ ! $PROFILE ]
then
  PROFILE="Main"
fi

DATA_DIR="/home/msch/.config/chromium/$PROFILE"
REG_CACHE="$DATA_DIR/Default/Cache"
MEM_CACHE="/tmp/chrome-$PROFILE-cache"

# maybe we're creating a new profile?!
if [ ! -d $DATA_DIR ]
then
  mkdir -p $REG_CACHE
fi

# maybe we just rebooted, let's make sure we move our cache dir to ram!
# /tmp gets mounted tmpfs around here...
if [ ! -d $MEM_CACHE ]
then
  if [ -h $REG_CACHE ]
  then
    rm -f $REG_CACHE
    mkdir $MEM_CACHE
  else
    mv $REG_CACHE $MEM_CACHE
  fi
  ln -s $MEM_CACHE $REG_CACHE
fi

# now can we finally start?
/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser --restore-last-session --user-data-dir=$DATA_DIR

Double sweet! Name it something cool (chrome), make it executable (chmod +x chrome), and drop it in your path (mv chrome /usr/local/bin). Now we can create new profiles and launch existing profiles with reckless abandon.

chrome reader
chrome dev
chrome anydangthingiwant

Triple sweet.