No matter how many other programs I am running, when I open task manager it always seems like Chrome is at 1000 or 2000+ MB of memory usage, whereas everything else barely hits 500MB
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Basically it uses lots of memory for stability and convenience. For example pre-loading a page it thinks you’ll go to and storing it in memory (convenience) or spinning up a new process for each tab so that if one crashes the others won’t (stability).
These are things the user tends to care about and memory is pretty cheap and abundant. Why economize on memory when it will cost performance on things the user cares about?
There are a few reasons why modern web browsers in general consume so much RAM. The biggest reason is because modern web pages are so robust and complicated. All the interactivity, colorful moving graphics, responsiveness, any add-ons or plug-ins, and everything else that makes a web page useful and engaging requires a lot of resources.
RAM is needed to hold all that information all at once so that you can have a smooth and responsive experience. Couple that with the fact that most people have multiple tabs or windows open means it takes up a lot of RAM.
I think a better way to think about it is that all of the web pages and extensions you have open are taking up a lot of RAM. It’s just that to your operating system, they’re all grouped together as “Chrome”.
Did you know Chrome has its own Task Manager? Find it in the Chrome menu, under “More Tools”. That will show you how much RAM each webpage you’re using has open.
For example, for me, Gmail is using up 285 MB of RAM. That might seem like a lot, but it’s a pretty complex app with lots of features, and it caches a lot of mail so that when you click on it, it loads instantly. That takes RAM.
Others have given great answers, I just wanted to add that Chrome will automatically scale back its RAM usage if other apps start to need it. So you shouldn’t have any negative issues caused by chrome taking up so much RAM!
Short answer is to keep things fast. Modern web pages are incredibly complicated, they are programs in their own right. You know how reference books will have an index at the end that lets you find the page some information you want is on without reading the entire book? Or in a library there’s the Dewey Decimal system that can tell you which shelf a book you want is on? A web page is a program that basically does this. A lot. As in thousands of times a second, particularly when a page first loads. Modern browsers will essentially take a 10mb web page and create an index that is several times the size of the web page to make the page load and do everything it needs to do.
A huge chunk of that memory footprint will be taken up by this index as well as the source code and other things to keep a web page responding to you quickly. Without that memory footprint, it would be like trying to load a modern web page on a 90’s or early 2000’s computer/browser/internet connection.
There are other considerations a well such as security sandboxing and more modern approaches such as single page apps, and they all have a memory cost. Ultimately the idea is that memory is cheap and it’s a waste to not use it if it’s there.
Because now that it’s the dominant browser and most peoples default it’s gotten bloated, slow, and inefficient, just like Netscape and IE before it. It’s coasting on reputation to, many still assume it’s the fastest/best browser because it USED to be, back when it wasn’t the number one. But when you have as dominant a position as Chrome does you don’t have to be as competitive, reputation and inertia let you get away with a lot. On Windows I use Firefox as my primary browser and Safari on Mac. I only use Chrome when I absolutely have to.
Don’t think of Chrome as one app. Think of it as like 5 or 10.
It renders webpages.
It plays video.
It can stream audio.
It runs Javascript programs.
It can do 3d graphics.
It can stream data to and from the internet.
It acts as a firewall.
It isolates each javascript program (and webpage) from all the rest, requiring duplicates of all the above functionality.
Every tab you have open is like a set of programs all working together to make a webpage do its thing.
What chrome does as opposed to other browsers is it treats each tab as it’s own thing.
Think of lights wired in parallel as opposed to in series.
In series if 1 light goes out they all go out. In parallel if 1 light goes out the rest are fine. In most other browsers if 1 tab crashes then it takes down everything else with it as opposed to Chrome if 1 crashes only that one crashes and the rest are fine.
That comes at a cost which is ram and on top of that its doing a bunch of other stuff in the background like syncing.
Memory can be used to create the illusions of speed that people are most happy with.
If you get everything into memory before you do the layouts, the layouts look like they happen all at once. In old web browsers you would see the page building itself as each fragment arrived.
So much more so for going back to a previously loaded pages or other tabs.
Then there are piles of “maybe assets”. You know, maybe the user’s going to open this subpanel, maybe the user is going to click that control, and so forth. Forth. There are options you might pick, pains you might open, and scripts you might run.
Then there’s all the pains, scripts and panels you’ve previously opened that you might go back to.
Many programs are designed to just keep on filling memory until they hit some sort of limit. The average program running on a Windows box thinks It has access to way more memory than you actually have on your computer. The memory map is bigger than the memory. The operating systems job is to swap things in and out of memory to make good on the promises of the memory map. And even then, the memory map is probably bigger than the accommodation of real memory and virtual memory stored out to disk.
If you could shovel that many words and pictures through your word processor. It would use up just as much memory as a modern browser.
Then there are caches of cookies and databases of cashed images and then there’s the overhead of organizing all that stuff.
Be will informed user will find the selections and settings that let them control how voracious the web browser will be, knowing full well that you will be cutting away some of that illusion of speed. Speed.
There’s also no award for free memory. While engaging in processing. You don’t win a prize at half beer RAM goes unused. So if the thing you’re doing is just mucking around on the net then why be frugal?
The only time you really care about the memory use by your browser is when you’re popping up web pages while you’re gaming or something. If you’re playing online role-playing game and you’re also trying to pursue the web guide and sure, those two programs are bump into each other because they both want all the memory .
But in practical terms, no matter how little or how much memory you have, you’ll fill it eventually and get back to why is this so damn slow.
I don’t know why, other than it’s getting close to unbearable. As in… Firefox is starting to look good. But I have Chrome setup so well I hate the transition period.
I stopped watching YouTube in a Chrome tab, usually in a 1/4 screen window on the left side of my monitor. There are instances where the YT tab grows from ~300MB at birth, until it’s >8GB (yes, one tab consuming 8GB), at which point something kills it; making the sad face error on the tab. Press F5 and the YT restarts as if nothing happened. And usually, over as little as 2 hours, it will grow back to 8GB and be killed.
This happens some days ending in “y”, yet other such days no problem. Once it starts happening, sometimes a reboot is required.
And loading long (200+ messages) Fark pages, can bring my whole machine to a crawl. As in Windows Task Manager hanging for 5 or more seconds.
I had a thought recently that Chrome could have “Open in New tan and then KILL” in the URL context menu. Load the page in a background tab, finish loading it completely, then kill the page, so it goes to the sad face error screen. This should consume little cPU or memory, but a simple F5 on returning to the tab and the page is there. Might even come from cache.
I’m not a developer, so no idea what this would do for reals. But something’s got to be done or I’m eventually switching away from Chrome.
Sorry for the rant. You triggered some deep rage.
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