Your Chrome's too slow? Extensive RAM usage may be the answer
Google Chrome is undoubtedly wonderful – provided that we have enough RAM in our PC. Those who use older machine often grumble about the performance of Google's browser and say that their computer slows down significantly. Why is it so? What should you do?
One of the most important things about Chrome is the fact that the browser runs each tab as a separate process. For a newbie, tracking which process bears responsibility for overall performance may seem difficult – when you open Windows Task Manager, you may expect seeing more than one service labeled as chrome.exe. Though it is written which of them “eats up” how much of your precious RAM, how can you know which one to close if you're afraid that your PC is about to crash?
Fortunately, there is a quite simple solution. Type a phrase chrome://memory-redirect/ into your browser's address bar. This way you'll get an access to About memory module – a memory manager for Chrome.
Take a look at the screen below:
The first category, Summary, provides you with information about total RAM usage (almost 500 MB with 4 tabs open, in this case) and virtual memory usage (also about 500 MB, 158 MB mapped memory included – talking human: in use right now).
Below there is also a list of processes. As you can see, Adblock Plus alone – a popular plug-in that block aggressive advertisements – munches around 75 MB of RAM! Gmail is worth almost 150 MB. Flash takes about 20 MB. This way, you can easily track down all the unnecessary plug-ins that slow down your machine.
Unfortunately, it's not possible to stop processes when in About memory module. To do it, open console (e.g. by typing cmd in Menu Start/Launch) and type taskkill /PID XXXX. PID is the number you see in the first column, on the left in Chrome's About memory list. However, doing it every time you open the browser seems pointless, so you'd better just identify any plug-ins you don't really use and just uninstall them.
In Chrome's Tools there is also a Task Manager. Though information there is not as detailed as in About memory, PID numbers are also included.
If your computer is still slow, maybe you should consider changing the browser. As far as I know, on PCs that have no more than 1GB of RAM Firefox proves to be much more efficient – at least I use it on a daily basis and it seems fine. And it's not only about how fast it loads the pages, but also about how it affects PC's overall performance.
Do you also have such problems? Or maybe your machine is so pumped that you don't have to worry about the browser? Share your opinion!