Google Chrome briefly hangs before rendering a new tab

Whenever I want to switch to a tab other than the one that is being rendered, Chrome hangs for about 2 seconds before rendering the new tab. This occurs whenever a new tab has to be showed, such as clicking the "New Tab" button, or closing the current tab.

Here's my version information:

Google Chrome 14.0.835.163 (Official Build 101024)

OS:Linux (Ubuntu 11.04)

WebKit 535.1 (branches/chromium/835@94713)

The only extension I use is AdBlock, and disabling it had no effect.

This has only been occurring to me since I updated to the most recent version of Chrome.

Any idea of what's going on?

I encountered a similiar behaviour with tabs that weren't (pre)rendered in the background anymore and sometimes not even when brought up front. Fortunately I remembered having activated the GPU-Compositing in about:flags (which worked fine until one or two weeks ago). Disabeling it again solved this issue.

I just now also tracked down another issue with libcairo2 currently in Debian Sid. See Debian bug #682308.

With cairo-1.12.0, there is a regression bug causing tab switching and new tabs opening in Google Chrome and Chromium to stall significantly and spike xorg CPU usage.

Three different workarounds are mentioned in the bug report, awaiting an upstream fix:

• Running

  nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=0
  

• Pinning package to version 1.10.2-7.
• Building recent libcairo with patch changing src/cairo-xlib-display.c by setting display->buggy_gradients to be always TRUE (from a post on the Debian forums) (consider pinning it too, in case future libcairo2 updates still lack the fix).

This finally solved my issues.

UPDATE

This is supposedly fixed in Nvidia driver 304.30 released 2012-07-30. From the changelog (not yet online, due to NvNews recently being hacked recently and Nvidia's own page not hosting the changelog specifically, but it is inside the binary package they provide):

- Fixed a problem where RENDER Glyphs operations would exhibit severe
  performance issues in certain cases, such as when used with gradients
  by Cairo and Chromium.

UPDATE 2

...and now this driver version has hit Debian Unstable, at least.