I’m having issues with my sucky laptop struggling with memory to run a game and am eyeing chrome as the usual memory hog. I only reboot my computer to get updates and I usually leave my chrome running, with way too many tabs open, none stop so it’s consuming of memory is understandable. What bothered me was that even when I went through and started pruning tabs I didn’t see as much memory returning as expected. For the record the only addon I have is adblock and I’ve tried disabling it and that didn’t seem to fix the root issue.
As an experiment I took a chrome that was open for awhile and closed all but one tab, the tab was opened to stack exchange home page. I looked at the memory usage both reported by windows task manager and chrome’s own task manager. I then closed chrome entirely, reopened it, and immediately navigated to the same stack exchange site and checked the memory usage and I saw a decent memory difference between the newly reopened and previously opened chromes.
Looking at chrome’s task manager the primary chrome process went from ~400K to ~100K memory usage, the adblock addon likewise dropped from 250K to 100K. The memory usage allocated to stack exchange tab was about the same, and everything else was too negligible memory consumption to matter.
That’s about half a gig of memory that seems to have been ‘leaked’ while I left chrome running. I know enough about how memory management is usually done, and am giving chrome the benefit of doubt, to presume this memory isn’t really leaked so much as chrome has now over-allocated free memory and is just being greedy about releasing it.
My main question is rather there is a better way to reclaim this over-allocated memory without having to completely restart chrome? Let’s say I’ve taken the time to clean up half of my tabs, but sill want the other half to stay open. Can I get chrome to consolidate the used memory and free up the excess so chrome only retains as much memory as it actually needs for the tabs I want to keep while giving back enough to not kill my poor sucky laptop if I dare to try playing a game?
