Google Chrome web browser uses one process for every tab by default. If you open the Windows Task Manager, you will be able to see multiple Google Chrome processes. Internet Explorer also follows this model. The idea behind this is should any one of your tabs crashes, it will not crash the entire browser, as each tab will have its process running. Only that tab will crash.
If you feel the need to save some resources on your Windows machine, you can set Chrome to use only one process for all tabs of one website.
Chrome supports a process model, which groups all instances of the same website into the same process, while processes of different sites are isolated from each other. The benefit of using this model is that since this model creates fewer concurrent processes than the default model, the memory overhead will be reduced. This will result in saving of some resources of your computer.
The small price you will have to pay is that if a tab of one website crashes for some reason, all other tabs of the same website will crash. The browser or open tabs of other websites will, however, not crash.
This can result in another issue at times. It can result in large renderer processes:
Sites like google.com host a wide variety of applications that may be open concurrently in the browser, all of which would be rendered in the same process. Thus, resource contention and failures in these applications could affect many tabs, making the browser seem less responsive. It is unfortunately hard to identify site boundaries at a finer granularity than the registered domain name without breaking backwards compatibility.
To use this model, users should specify a –process-per-site command-line switch when starting Chromium. This creates fewer renderer processes, trading some robustness for lower memory overhead. This model is based on the origin of the content and not the relationships between tabs.
Fix: Chrome high CPU, Memory or Disk usage.
Make Chrome use less memory
So if you want to save memory while using Chrome, and are willing to make these small sacrifices, you may go ahead and configure Chrome to run in, what is called as Process-per-site mode. To do this, right-click on Chrome’s shortcut and select Properties. Append the –process-per-site switch to the target URL that you see in the box. You may also append it to the main Chrome’s executable in its Program Folder. Thus the path now will look as follows, in my case:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --process-per-site
Click on Apply and Exit.
Let us know if this made any difference to the way your Chrome runs.
Here are more ideas to reduce Chrome high memory usage & make it use less RAM.
- Tags: Chrome
