I think I finally cracked what was causing my work Macbook Pro (M2 chip) as well as my personal Macbook Air (Intel chip) to crawl to a halt when using Chrome or VSCode… Turns out GPU rendering was off.
To be frank, I’m not 100% sure what effect these flags have, but they definitely fixed the Chrome Helper process killing my CPU.
Chrome
Go to chrome://flags and set Enable to the following experimental flags:
- chrome://flags#ignore-gpu-blocklist
- chrome://#enable-gpu-rasterization
- chrome://#enable-zero-copy
- chrome://flags#canvas-oop-rasterization
VsCode
Cmd + P > Preferences Configure Runtime Arguments, and add into the ~/.vscode/argv.json file the following:
   "force-gpu-rasterization": true,
   "enable-oop-rasterization": true, 
   "enable-zero-copy": true,
   "ignore-gpu-blacklist": true,