This is the most bizarre thing I have seen on my system. I was exploring my Lucid Lynx today and I was shocked to see my system was running out of memory. I couldn’t believe it as I have 4GB of RAM running core2duo. So, I fired up my system and was dumbstruck to see 1 program using nearly 1 GB of memory (914 MB to be precise) and guess which program was that?? Our super fast Google Chrome!!!! I couldnt believe my eyes!! Here… I ‘ve included a screenshot 4 u guys to see. Calculate the total memory by adding up the memory which I have highlighted in the screenshot. All of them are being used by google chrome.
Any google devs looking at this post?? Pls help!!!!
N.B: I am running the latest Google Chrome from the repos.
I don’t see what’s so alarming about it. Google Chrome by design makes every tab a separate process, which means it, in total, will necessarily use more RAM than other web browsers with the same number of tabs open.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM:
http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/Linux%20Memory%20Management.htm
Dude, I find it hard to agree with you that a browser should use 1 GB of RAM. I had just 11 tabs open in Google Chrome. Imagine all those who has just 2GB of RAM? Their system will lock up if they open 22 tabs in two windows of Google Chrome! That’s ridiculous! I am sure there must be a better explanation.
What’s alarming is 20 tabs = unusable PC. I don’t know why you want to fill up your memory with shit instead of doing something useful with it. In Linux, a process overhead is very low, so whatever is going on it’s Google’s fault.
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Chrome is very poor in memory management.
I have the experience to use Google translation to translate one English web page into Chinese. And that single page took 375 MB memory, no picture, no flash, just text.
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from: http://dev.chromium.org/memory-usage-backgrounder
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Weaknesses of a Multi-Process Model on Memory Usage
Using a multi-process model within the browser offers benefits for reliability, robustness, and security of the browser. Those benefits drove our design toward the multi-process model, and you can read more about them here.
However, using multiple processes is somewhat at odds with building a lightweight browser. First off, each process does have some amount of overhead. The process overhead turns out to be relatively small, however, once you’ve accounted for the shared memory properly. The more significant handicaps are the replicated internal components of a browser, such as caches, JavaScript VM heaps, and internal data structures which must be duplicated inside multiple processes. JavaScript is particularly troublesome because of its garbage collected heap. Heaps are generally relatively large and must be replicated across each browser process.
How can Chromium overcome these deficiencies? In short, it can’t 🙂 All we can do is to make everything else that much smaller, so that the effects of being multi-process is minimized. As a result, there are degenerate cases where Chromium uses a lot more RAM than other browsers. The case which is worst is where many tabs are open, each to separate domains with large amounts of JavaScript. But for typical usage, we think Chromium fares well at balancing the benefits of multiple processes and also maintaining memory usage at levels which is lower than some popular browsers.
Note to techies: Check out single process mode. To see how Chromium would fare if it were not a multi-process model, you can ditch the multi-process model and run Chromium in ‘single process mode’ (use the –single-process command line option).
Agreed to what you are saying. But at what point will Google Chrome stop consuming memory? If it does not then it will potentially lead to a system lock up due to unavailability of RAM. I already have had instances where my Lucid Lynx had become horrible slow as I had left Google Chrome on for a few hours. I am concerned as I have 4 gigs of memory. What about users with 2gigs?
I have 1 gig, and Chrome is pissing me off <_< And I can't quit it, too, because I'm hooked up on omnibar T_T
You wrote…
“How can Chromium overcome these deficiencies? In short, it can’t All we can do is to make everything else that much smaller, so that the effects of being multi-process is minimized”
If you are targeting inefficiently programmed pages/scripts/activie content/java etc…then Windows 7 is actually encouraging such bad things by its enhanced memory management…
Gone are those days for good programmers…Chrome really has a tough days ahead…..
Bit late to the party here but the memory “leak” or allocation issues has to do with javascript. Javascript heavy sites (including the translation page) will eat metric truckloads of memory.
Disabling javascript will fix the issue but is a sucky option. I have a reddit tab open right now eating 600mb of memory, wowza.
Hi folks,
Got here investigating possible Chrome memory leaks. I can attest to the fact that my system became totally unusable with 2GB or RAM installed. I just upgraded to 4GB and got my freedom back but whenever I leave Chrome open for a large amount of time, the whole 4GB gets used up too.
I think the new updates of chrome and chromium have reduced memory footprints. I am currently on v6 dev channel.
Let me know ur views.
I see this on Fedora as well.
I understand the argument about Chrome being multi-process making it faster and making it also difficult to overcome the memory consumption, but it’s fud as Chrome doesn’t have this problem on Windows. The other issue is unusable PC…the behavior is once the memory starts climbing it doesn’t stop, and the computer becomes wacked. When this happened, I luckily had a terminal open and was able to killall chrome to get the PC back.
If Google intends to run Chrome OS (Linux) on this thing, which I understand to be intended for PCs with less juice, this needs to be solved.
Also I hear the “but but add-ons in a separate process is cool”….yeah, Firefox has this function as well (3.6.6+) and I have yet to have memory problem like this.
-Jase
Get this: I’m using an old computer with 512mb of ram. chrome absolutely stops my entire computer in its tracks even with 1.5GB of swap space. Something is definitely wrong here because my computer runs without issue when I use mozilla. they have to find a way to make chrome less memory intensive.
I have the same issue on my Lucid 64-bit laptop, but strangely, not on my 32-bit system.
Slows the laptop down as memory maxes out — starts having to page out to disk. I hear the hard drive going like mad, as Chrome sits there looking pretty and sucking.
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