Google Chrome is one of the most popular web browsers around, but it uses an exorbitant amount of your computer’s memory. A quick look at your task manager will turn up a shocking number of memory-hogging Chrome processes. Here’s why Chrome uses so much RAM—and the steps you can take to curb its gluttony.
What Chrome uses all that RAM for
Think about it: When you’re using a computer, most of what you do takes place in your browser, from opening tabs, to watching YouTube videos, to using web apps or extensions that integrate with the rest of your machine. That’s a lot of stuff.
Chrome splits every tab and extension into its own process, so if one thing crashes, it doesn’t bring down the whole web page or all of your open tabs at once. This is a lot more convenient for you, but it can lead to higher memory use since Chrome has to duplicate some tasks for every tab.
There are other things going on behind the scenes, too. Chrome’s prerendering feature, for example, can cause higher memory usage, but it makes your web pages load faster. Certain extensions or websites may also leak memory and cause higher RAM usage over time.
And, of course, the more tabs and extensions you have installed, open, and running, the more memory Chrome is going to use.
So yes: Chrome uses a lot of RAM, but it does so with (mostly) good reason: your convenience. We’re accustomed to lots of tabs and fast page loading, and the price we pay is measured in gigabytes of RAM.
High RAM usage is (usually) good
That huge number in your Task Manager’s Memory column may be shocking, but it’s also important to remember that free RAM is useless RAM. RAM exists for a reason: if your computer can store lots of stuff in its short-term memory, then it can recall those things quickly later on. And if your computer doesn’t end up needing that stuff, it will toss it to make room for other programs that need those resources. If RAM is empty, it isn’t being used, and you aren’t benefiting.
By that logic, having your RAM almost full can be a good thing. It becomes a bad thing when your RAM is constantly full and slowing down your system. If what you’re doing needs more memory than your computer has to offer, it’ll start swapping some of that short-term memory to your computer’s hard drive, which can be much slower.
In a nutshell: don’t flip out just because Chrome is using lots of RAM. That means it’s doing its job. If it’s taking up so much RAM that everything else you’re trying to do on your computer feels sluggish, you definitely have a problem worth addressing.
How to curb Chrome’s gluttonous appetite
So you know why Chrome uses lots of RAM, and you know that sometimes that’s OK. But if it’s causing slowdowns, you have two solutions: lower Chrome’s RAM usage or get more RAM for your computer.
The latter is very easy to do on a desktop computer (provided you have the money), but it may be more difficult to accomplish on your laptop if it isn’t upgradable. If that’s the situation you’re in, you’ll have to fall back on a different plan: sacrifice some conveniences in order to save some RAM.
Find out what’s hogging RAM—and close it
To start, open Chrome and press Shift+Esc (or, on a Mac, go to Window > Task Manager). This will open Chrome’s own Task Manager, which will give you a more accurate look into how much memory each tab and extension is taking up. You can click the top of the “Memory” column to sort it by highest RAM use to lowest.
Once you do this, you should have a good idea about where to start. Maybe you need to close those Gmail tabs, or maybe that convenient extension isn’t really worth the RAM usage. If that’s the case, uninstall it from your toolbar or via Chrome’s extensions page.
Manage your tab usage with memory-freeing extensions
Of course, some of us just can’t survive with fewer than two dozen tabs (our support group meets Tuesdays and Thursdays). If that sounds like you, there are a few extensions that can help. Installing more extensions to curb your RAM usage may seem counterintuitive, but it can actually make a significant dent.
The Great Suspender is a very cool extension that suspends tabs after they’ve been inactive for a certain amount of time. They’ll still be open in your tab bar—they’ll just take a little longer to load when you click on them since Chrome’s reloading them from scratch. If you keep tabs open with the intention of coming back to them later, this can be helpful.
Some folks also like OneTab, which performs a similar function, but without the automation. When you have a group of tabs you know you won’t need until later, you can click the OneTab button to close them all and open a single tab with links to each. That way, when you want to come back to them later, you can reopen them at will. This also reduces tab clutter, which is nice.
Session Buddy is another extension that allows you to categorize and save tabs and reopen them later.
Play around with all of the above solutions to figure out which ones fit best into your workflow. Just know that you’ll probably have to make some sacrifices—whether that means closing tabs, uninstalling extensions, or buying a new laptop with more RAM is up to you.
This story was originally published on 5/21/15 and was updated on 10/1/19 to provide more current information and resources. Updated on 3/3/22 with new details.