The entire Developer Console is built in JavaScript, which, despite recent advances in software and hardware, remains relatively slow in many cases compared to native applications. One place you'll notice this problem is in cases where a ton of work has to be done in a short period of time. Try setting your debug logs to the maximum setting, then try using the full perspective (Debug > Switch Perspective).
If you are debugging a log near 2MB, your browser will probably freeze momentarily trying to render the log. It's really not designed to do that, but we developers try anyways. Also, while in a maximum perspective, change the size of your window, and observe how it appears to stutter or freeze on the inside.
Now, to get to my point, when you're running a batch with say, 10,000 batches, the log table has to be redrawn many times per second potentially, with rapidly increasing memory usage and tons of elements. Your browser will try to accommodate the request to constantly redraw, eventually slowing to a crawl. You'll find that not only the Developer Console unresponsive, but the page you launched the Developer Console will also act jittery and/or freeze. This is because of JavaScript's single-thread model.
Run batches as an alternate user, when possible, or keep such batches small. Clear your logs frequently, as well, since once you get to a couple of hundred logs, you'll notice a pretty sharp decline in performance. You'll probably eventually need to close the window every so often and/or all of the files you're working on, or the console will eventually become slow as things keep piling on, such as the progress sub-tab, which can accumulate thousands of items of its own.
I have also been experiencing this. Here are the steps that I have taken to 'fix it' quotes are because the fix seems to expire... sigh!
In the dev console debug ==> change log levels set the monitoring level on the classes you want to track in the log and set the expiration time to be in the future. The red ones are expiring so you want them to be green.
Also in the dev console, uncheck show my current logs only.
Through the Salesforce UI add yourself to the monitored users.
Also in the SF UI under develop==> test execution ==> options uncheck store only aggregated code coverage.
These steps got me close to being able to monitor the logs as before... Good luck!
Best Answer
EDIT: This is fixed. It should be safe to dive back in.
Chrome changed the way it accepted inputs to resize methods in v25, so we had to modify our resize code. They're not as forthcoming with release notes and regression testing as we are!
EDIT: This is officially logged as a known issue - Developer Console log viewer fails to display correctly on Chrome v25
Hi all: The development team is aware of this issue and has been working through the weekend to isolate it. The Javascript console isn't showing errors, so it took us a while to pin it down. We will release something as soon as we are confident that we've restored relative stability.
EDIT: It appears this issue exists in Chrome 25, but not in Chrome 24.
UPDATE: There is a known incompatibility between EXT 4.1 and Chrome 25. When your browser got auto-updated, you got to experience this first-hand in the developer console. The layouts stop rendering, which is what you see (or don't see). Sencha, the creator of the EXT library, is working on this issue, and we're waiting on them.
What we found in doing a lot of repro work is that the workspace can get messed up by opening a log with three columns (stack tree, execution log, and source, for example). If you change the default perspective to exclude the stack tree and execution stack, you should avoid the rendering issues.
Firefox seems to work, so that's probably the easiest workaround while this general bug gets sorted between Sencha and Google. Another option is to uninstall Chrome 25, reinstall Chrome 24, and turn off automatic updates. That seems like overkill compared to using Firefox, but it should work!