The context switch itself is almost trivial at that scale -- a couple hundred ns per switch, with the occurrence interval in the 10s-100s of milliseconds, depending on the CPU scheduler. The part that hurts is all the cache invalidation. Unless you're actually swapping. Then you're really hosed.
Well, that and any particularly nasty plugins (cough flash cough) that don't like many instances at once.
Which OS are you running? I have yet to see chrome on linux have any hiccups on as many tabs as I throw at it. The only time I've seen hiccups are when the X server's busy on something else or I'm short on memory.
If you're on another OS, perhaps chrome's suffering b/c it can't share GDI resources (or mac's equiv) across tabs? I'm assuming it can't, as each tab's got a different process ID.
Well, that and any particularly nasty plugins (cough flash cough) that don't like many instances at once.
Which OS are you running? I have yet to see chrome on linux have any hiccups on as many tabs as I throw at it. The only time I've seen hiccups are when the X server's busy on something else or I'm short on memory.
If you're on another OS, perhaps chrome's suffering b/c it can't share GDI resources (or mac's equiv) across tabs? I'm assuming it can't, as each tab's got a different process ID.