HD station Chrome recently extremely slow browsing

[jaschmibu]

Hello,
for the past six months or so I was able to use the Chrome browser for simple browsing and some flash video watching. Recently, since about three weeks (but not necessarily since the latest FW update) this has become impossible.
Websites load very slow, the HDs are very heavily working and creating quite a bit of noise, videos are not playing properly at all. The whole experience would feel like on a very old machine with very little ram.
However, when copying large numbers of files to and from the NAS the drives would work quietly and fast. Also when using XBMC in the HD station to play movies from the drives the experience is flawless. It's frustrating, especially since it has been working better previously.

I have a TS-269l with FW 4.2.0 from 2016-01-01.
HD station is v 2.1.0 with Chrome 38.0.2125.
Drives are 2 WD Reds with 2 TB each, disk health is good and no errors reported.

Any help or suggestions very appreciated.
Thanks!

[giopas]

Have you tried to restart HD Station? Did you tried to loaed Chrome without extensions? Did you tried to clean up the browser cache?

Moreover if I am not mistaken Google Chrome has been recently updated in HD Station. Did you upgrade the package?

[jaschmibu]

Thanks for your reply.
Yes, I have restarted the NAS several times, cleaned the browser cache. I have no extensions installed in Chrome.
I'm not sure if a Chrome update has been causing this, but I didn't manually update the Chrome and normally all HD station app updates need to be manually installed as by my settings.
When playing a video in Chrome RAM usage is 75% and the Chrome process takes about 21% of CPU, so neither of that seems to be the issue.
It's also not the internet connection speed, as even if a video has been downloaded/cached fully it is extremely choppy in playback.
I get the feeling it has something to do with the disks as disk noise is clearly audible during Chrome webbrowsing, especially video streaming. However, the disks work fine everywhere else and read and write transfers are well within the normal boundaries.

[jaschmibu]

Ok, resolved it by adding another 1Gb of Ram. Even though only 70% of RAM was shown as used previously it seemed to have offloaded a lot of memory on the hard drive, which explains the heavy HD noise. With the added Ram there's no problem anymore.

[ts251plus]

I made Chrome faster by enabling #ignore-gpu-blacklist in chrome://flags
Hardware acceleration works perfectly on my QNAP TS251Plus, 2 GB RAM