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Does Google Chrome Really Use This Much Memory !!!

H

Hydrocity

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 14, 2010
527
0
:eek:

I dont know what all of these individual things are, and if they are necessary, but there is a lot of memory hogging going on.

There is approx 1.15 GB being used.

1.jpg
2.jpg

Now, since I have 8GB, its not really affecting me, but I just want to know if this is normal. Safari and Firefox rarely go over 300mb.

(I only have 5 tabs open. No flash)
 
Safari is just as bad.

I was testing Macs at the apple store the other day, opened safari, which loaded 6 sites in it's favorites view and Safari grabbed mor than 200mb of ram. It's not like the 5 preload pages and 1 page I chose had anywhere near 200MB of data.

I blame sloppy engineering, since they expect you to have alot of ram, they don't optimize their apps.

I continuously run into problems in safari with 2GB of ram. Safari will take 900+ MB of real ram with 15 web pages open, which probably have less than 50MB of data, or much much less. If it it takes that much ram, I would expect to be able to hit the back button once or more without stutter or beachballs.

It's like MS Word, it's no faster than it was 15 years ago but needs much more ram.
 
Thanks for the replies. So I guess it is normal?

Like I said, it's no problem right now, but it may be when I get back to school where I use RAM
 
It seems as if Chrome uses a bit more memory than firefox. Sucks...because I like chrome much better!
 
No, I don't think it's actually using that much memory. It's an over-counting bug.

In chrome url bar, type "about:memory" and see what chrome says it's using and then there's also a link to the bug explanation.
 
Safari is using 1.4 GB on my MacBook Pro right now. That's with 3 windows and 10 tabs total.

Quite a lot, but it doesn't bother me.
 
JTToft said:
Safari is using 1.4 GB on my MacBook Pro right now. That's with 3 windows and 10 tabs total.

Quite a lot, but it doesn't bother me.
Click to expand...

geez. never heard of that much.

i've never gotten mine over 350mb. then again i don't really have more than about 7-8 tabs at once. most of the time i try to just have 1 or 2 open which is about 140mb-ish.
 
educate me a little

Why do you have 100MB of page outs and an amount of the swap file used if you have 8gb of ram and only 4.87 used?
 
In Safari, whether you close all windows and only have 1, still memory using it, unless you quit it
 
Kuray said:
In Safari, whether you close all windows and only have 1, still memory using it, unless you quit it
Click to expand...

I can make little sense of that post... Are you saying that the memory is not released until the application process is completely terminated? If so, then can that memory also become 'inactive' or cached in case the app is launched again, while still available for other processes to use it if required?

Both MacRumors and Apple support have pages explaining types of RAM and how the activity monitor breaks down its system memory statistics.

apple support quote: Page outs occur when your Mac has to write information from RAM to the hard drive (because RAM is full). Adding more RAM may reduce page outs.


My question is, if you have a combined total of both inactive and free memory (5.49GB) available, Why is your system writing to the swap file?
Could this be an inaccurate activity monitor and not Chrome perhaps?

Just to see what would happen, i launched over 50 apps, a couple of games and converted some music in garage band all at once. even after doing all this i still had over 3GB 'free' ram with 0 bytes of page outs, 0 bytes of swap used...

Again, as per my first post, educate me. I am not making any claims that i know the answer to your post, But if my observation is legitimate, Then it may be linked to your problem some how? :)
 
In my experience Safari will use the same, usually more (not that it matters). Chrome is built better, each tab is it's own process. Also, for an accurate read of how much memory Chrome is using type "about:memory" into the URL bar. Finally, you have the RAM, use it! Idle RAM is a waste.
 
Last edited:
smoge said:
more than 5 processes, uses your eyes.
Click to expand...

Chrome separates several things (the browser itself, the renderer, each tab, extensions, GPU Process, plugins etc.) out into their own process. It's not just x tabs = x processes.

This improves Security, Stability and Performance.
 
Daveoc64 said:
Chrome separates several things (the browser itself, the renderer, each tab, extensions, GPU Process, plugins etc.) out into their own process. It's not just x tabs = x processes.

This improves Security, Stability and Performance.
Click to expand...

indeed! and although it uses more memory it means *** since we now have as the usual 4gb.

I usually run around that number on windows, although I have 3 extensions, and usually 10+ tabs, the problem is that the code for osx is still behind the one for windows, but it competes with the linux version
 
DesmoPilot said:
In my experience Safari will use the same, usually more (not that it matters). Chrome is built better, each tab is it's own process. Also, for an accurate read of how much memory Chrome is using type "about:memory" into the URL bar. Finally, you have the RAM, use it! Idle RAM is a waste.
Click to expand...

Thats why Im not really worrying about it. But I may start to if I need the extra ram for other things.
 
DesmoPilot said:
In my experience Safari will use the same, usually more (not that it matters). Chrome is built better, each tab is it's own process. Also, for an accurate read of how much memory Chrome is using type "about:memory" into the URL bar. Finally, you have the RAM, use it! Idle RAM is a waste.
Click to expand...

In my experience, when Flash crashes in one tab in Chrome, which is often, I have to quit the browser to get it back for any tab.
 
kockgunner said:
In my experience, when Flash crashes in one tab in Chrome, which is often, I have to quit the browser to get it back for any tab.
Click to expand...

Never had that happen myself, or to anyone I know. When flash crashes it only effects the one tab in my experience.
 
kockgunner said:
In my experience, when Flash crashes in one tab in Chrome, which is often, I have to quit the browser to get it back for any tab.
Click to expand...

That shouldn't be the case (well, Flash shouldn't crash either). You should be able to refresh the page and the plugin should reload.
 
encomium23 said:
I can make little sense of that post... Are you saying that the memory is not released until the application process is completely terminated? If so, then can that memory also become 'inactive' or cached in case the app is launched again, while still available for other processes to use it if required?

Both MacRumors and Apple support have pages explaining types of RAM and how the activity monitor breaks down its system memory statistics.

apple support quote: Page outs occur when your Mac has to write information from RAM to the hard drive (because RAM is full). Adding more RAM may reduce page outs.


My question is, if you have a combined total of both inactive and free memory (5.49GB) available, Why is your system writing to the swap file?
Could this be an inaccurate activity monitor and not Chrome perhaps?

Just to see what would happen, i launched over 50 apps, a couple of games and converted some music in garage band all at once. even after doing all this i still had over 3GB 'free' ram with 0 bytes of page outs, 0 bytes of swap used...

Again, as per my first post, educate me. I am not making any claims that i know the answer to your post, But if my observation is legitimate, Then it may be linked to your problem some how? :)
Click to expand...

As a reply with screenshots please check
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=12876195
 
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