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I recently switched to Chrome from FF because FF was freezing all the time (this happened on all of my computers, so it's not an issue with my computer).

I've noticed that Chrome seems to use up a LOT of memory. Right now I have about 70 tabs open and Chrome is using somewhere in the neighborhood of 8.5GB of memory (it's hard to say exactly, because annoyingly it seems that Chrome has a separate process in Task Manager for each tab).

Is that normal? If not, what can I do to figure out why it's using so much memory?

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  • Depends on what you have open. It uses ~300mb-400mb on my comp with 6-7 tabs open. But seriously, for what do you need 70 tabs? But AFAIK, chrome is the lightest out there, doubt you'll have less on any other browser. Could check memory leaks, only thing that comes on my mind. EDIT: calulated now, it's 550 mb for 7 tabs, what I am using atm.
    – Luke
    Aug 9, 2013 at 13:29
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    Not trying to make fun, but this would be similar to asking why your car is so hot after you've been driving 200 mph. 70 tabs is quite a lot. What is memory usage when you have a normal amount of tabs open (15 max)?
    – user201262
    Aug 9, 2013 at 13:35
  • You guys are saying 70 tabs is "abnormal"?
    – Nate
    Aug 9, 2013 at 13:37
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    It is not 'annoying' that Chrome uses a seperate process for each tab or else if one of your tabs crashed the whole application would crash like FF did. Separate processes allows chrome to manage individual tabs and handle individual tab errors Aug 9, 2013 at 13:41
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    Like Jason said, the multi-process model is a design choice that is supposed to be beneficial. Of course it does have the downside that it waste memory which might not be a problem in the future, but for now, you just experienced its downside first hand.
    – Synetech
    Aug 9, 2013 at 13:53

1 Answer 1

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Estimating Chrome's memory footprint using Task Manager can easily give you incorrect results, because some of the memory is shared between tab/plugin processes. You can get correct data by navigating to this URI: (SU won't let me make it a real link)

chrome://memory-redirect/

Back to your issue. If you have 70 tabs open, it will surely consume A LOT of memory. If it's really 8 GB in total, then it's about 110 MB per tab - pretty good result, I have 4 tabs open right now and my memory consumption is 215 MB per tab.

That's not strange that Chrome consumes so much memory and Firefox had crashed for you, no browser is designed to handle 70 tabs at once. Your brain isn't too, and I doubt you're using all of them at once - my experience tells me that 20 tabs is a lot and about half of them is just hanging there, because something popped up and interrupted your previous task.

You can do yourself (and your computer!) a favor by changing your browsing habits. Get some tab organizing extension, like Pocket/Pickpocket or some tab saver. Less tabs are easier to handle and working with them is more efficient, both for you and for your browser.

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    no browser is designed to handle 70 tabs at once. It depends on the sites. I’ve had times when I ended up with 120+ tabs open. Not surprisingly it was really frustrating because my system slowed to a crawl since Chrome sucked up all the memory and caused the hard-drive to thrash because of the swapfile. Chrome seems to be inefficient with memory, but also, web pages are more memory greedy these days. Get some tab organizing extension I’d recommend Session Buddy; it is ideal for tab management.
    – Synetech
    Aug 9, 2013 at 13:50

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