Why do browsers sometimes drain a lot of RAM until rebooted?

Question

Why do browsers sometimes drain a lot of RAM until rebooted?

In: 5662

Answer 1

Let’s use a kitchen for our example. You want to cook some food, so you need to go to the fridge and get the ingredients.

At first, you have 0 ingredients, so you call in an order from Walmart delivery. It gets there and you put it in the fridge. You decide you want to keep that recipe in mind, but you decide to start another recipe. Well, you have 0 ingredients for the second recipe, so you place another order.

This continues until your fridge is too full. You’re now spending more time trying to keep things in the fridge and organized than looking at recipes.

Then, you decide to shut off the fridge. All the food goes bad, you throw out all the food, and when you begin again with an empty fridge when you turn it on again.

Now, you may have thrown away all the Rotten food, but you didn’t wipe the fridge clean. You still have crumbs and mold inside the fridge. You start adding more food to your fridge, but there were some crumbs left over so you don’t quite have as much room to put the fresh stuff in. You keep doing this over and over and eventually you will have no room for even fresh food.

The fridge is your computers memory. A browser tab is your recipe book. The store is the server the site is hosted on. The food is the information given to your computers memory. The fresh food is the stuff you can use faster than the crumbs that you have to wipe up and collect. The crumbs are the details stored on your hard drive that take just slightly longer to pull up, but stick around a lot longer.

I hope that helps.