The desktop is a messy place. Here are some field notes:
Problem: System runs dog slow when chrome is running.
The pkg-readme for chrome says
You may need to crank shared memory limits for chromium to work properly under load: # sysctl kern.shminfo.shmall=32768 Your default datasize might not be enough for v8 so make sure it is more than 512M, so try to set it to 715M by doing: $ ulimit -d 716800 or modify /etc/login.conf.
So I started tweaking -