How to Make Google Chrome Use less Memory

by Ashar

Google Chrome users appreciate its ease of use, services it provides and speed. But the memory consumption of Chrome has been quite a complaint. It uses a lot of your hard drive space. Though it is because of its built-in crash proof features, but still its memory usage is absurd and annoying. Well, you are not completely helpless about your computer’s memory if you are a Chrome user; following tips will help you minimize the memory consumption of Google Chrome.

1.  Avoid using extensions. Although extensions make sites like YouTube, Google + etc. available at one click but they consume so much memory. Instead, use bookmarklets and userscripts. Bookmarlets are souped-up versions of regular Chrome bookmarks and they don’t take additional memory. Moreover, they can be easily handled using Chrome bookmark sync feature. Userscripts are also a good alternative of extensions as they don’t use memory space of their own, so make use of them to enhance your favorite sites. To remove an extension, go to settings> Extensions. Click “Remove”.
2. Chrome is a multi-process browser. For each tab, it runs a separate process. But Chrome supports other process models as well. Chrome has following settings to handles each process: Process per tab: An independent process runs for each open tab. Though it makes the browser stable but it consumes a lot of memory.

Process per site: Runs per process per unique website. It is the default model. For example, if a user is running Yahoo mail in one tab and Facebook in other tab, there will be two Google tabs running in the same process.

Single process: All open tabs run in a single process, thus freeing up memory for other applications. So, this is what we are actually looking for. To run Chrome in a single process, create a shortcut of Chrome. Open “Properties” tab.  Got to “Target” box and edit it like this image.

Similarly, you can create shortcuts for Process per tab and process per site models too, to handle your browsing in three ways.

3.     Add a purge memory button to Chrome task manager. This method frees up a little bit unused memory; about 10 MB.

To add a purge memory button, go to “Properties” of Chrome. Go to “Target” box and add -purge-memory-button after “C:Program FilesGoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe”.

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Now while using Chrome, open Task Manager (of Chrome, not of Windows) by going to Settings>tools>task manager (or simply click Shift+ Escape) and you will see a purge memory button.

Google Chrome task manager gives all the information of RAM consumption; how many tabs, extensions and plug-ins you are using and how much memory they are utilizing. You can check from here which component is consuming much of the memory and close it.
For this, go to task manager of Chrome (by pressing Shift+ escape). Task manager window will pop-up. Select the page you want to close. Click “End Process”.

4.  Chrome may save images, videos and other data in cache for ease of access. It also takes up memory, so clear cache to free up some space. Go to “Tools” and select “Clear Browsing Data”. Delete all data by selecting “Beginning of Time”. Click clear browsing data.

Using above tips, you can use chrome any way you want, controlling the memory consumption. If you know other ways to make Chrome use less memory, feel free to share with us in comments.