Let me start by saying, that Chrome is a proprietary application that is developed by Google.
It is based on an open-source project, which many browsers these days are based on. The Chromium project. The companies just adjust it to their own liking and offer it as their own derivative.
Now, what can you do to decrease the RAM usage of Chrome? Get Chromium and modify the source code. This should be interesting. But I guess, this is not what you asked. Well, the problem is, that the application itself is built that way. So, you can’t expect to just klick a few checkboxes and now it uses half the RAM. That’s not going to happen. That is what I’m trying to say, expectation-wise.
Now, what can you do to decrease RAM usage?
There are actually a few options. But this really is all about weight vs. versatility and functionality. So, if you dial down weight, you will likely lose functionality or speed.
And there is our first interesting encounter. Because Chromium and derivatives are built for speed and performance. Unlike Firefox for example. You will notice, that Firefox seems to keep a way lower memory profile. On the other hand you will also learn, that Firefox is vastly slower than Chromium and it’s derivatives.
One example for that statement is, that Chromium and derivatives take a lot more time to clean not used memory. They keep it for now, in case you move up the ladder again and start opening tons of tabs again, like you might have done before. Why? Because it’s faster than to always clear memory, then ask the operating system for space again, allocate it again… that takes time and performance. This is something you have to live with, when it comes to Chromium and derivatives. The only option to prevent this is, to open little at a time, work through it, then open the next chunk, instead of opening everything at the same time to work through it later.
To decrease the RAM profile, one option is to remove or at least disable all extensions you don’t really need or use on a regular basis. This is the first one. Remove everything you don’t need. Extensions, themes, tabs,…
Speaking of, here is a second one. Over the years, bookmarks can actually clutter up to many many many hundreds of MB. And guess where that goes! Even more so if you have everything in your bookmarks bar! So, here is another hint. Dial it down. Chromium and derivatives make it quite easy to bookmark tons of stuff, including full windows as directories. Well, that goes straight to RAM! So, do yourself a favor and clean up your bookmarks once in a while. Just export them into a HTML backup, then cut it down to the necessary stuff.
One the other hand, there is another hint!
Web technology has become very intense at this point. Just think about all the media it could use. And now understand, that the browser has to now them all and somehow to deal with them. This makes browsers generally very bloated and if not, quite limited in functionality. So, you can assume, that even a very basic browser will already put like 300MB on your RAM.
Now, with each tab you open, another around 50MB are going to add to your RAM load. So, guess what the next hint is going to be? Limit the number of tabs you open at the same time. There is a great extension that helps you keep track. It’s called… “too many tabs” 😉
But how can you do that? There is so much to explore? Well, first of all, keep it organized. Then work on one topic at a time not 20 topics here and there. Make sure you stick with this by actually removing stuff that you don’t actually work on at this point. And here is where the multi-tab bookmarking actually comes in very handy. At least in the short run. You might wanna put it in the background though, in the “other bookmarks”, instead of your bookmarks bar.
Now, that just basics. Because not included are all kinds of web contents like video, animated gif and all that crap. These days there are few people out there who actually care about content. Websites are toys. They don’t care about marketing, content,… so-called web designers are all about technology and toys… they are so full of themselves. Sorry, this has to be said at some point. Just try my website. This is located in Germany… meaning, you access it long distance. And the fun part is, unlike many other sites, it doesn’t even use caching yet. How does it perform?
Long story short, this adds a lot to your RAM load. This all has to go into your RAM. There are some nice extensions that limit websites themselves. Like for example, block ads with lightweight ad blockers. These are often extensive to be eye-catching. They are not just basic images. They are animated or switch images and so forth. Also, I don’t have it in my browser right now, but there is one that gives you the text of a website only. This dials down RAM usage significantly.
Also look into suspending tabs. There are plugins to suspend inactive tabs to dial down RAM load. Honestly, the experience is, that for rapid work it’s quite annoying. But if you are an average user and have limited RAM, just suspend your inactive tabs to dial down RAM load.
And finally… and this one is going to speak more to Linux users than to Windows users: the most RAM intense processes related to Chromium and derivatives are the rendering processes. And in the process list you might actually find the term “renderer” in the details.
Personally, I’ve written a script and tied it to a keyboard shortcut. It kills all renderer processes. This cuts my RAM usage down, for example from 96% to like 30% or even less! But doing so, it doesn’t actually crash your browser. I have another shortcut for that 😛 This has both, advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is, that other web-based applications will give you crap too and you might have to restart them. So, make sure you always save your stuff first, to prevent data loss.
As far as Chromium and derivatives go, this is basically a last resort, just short of the whole thing freezing. But what it does is, it will suddenly tell you that all of the open websites couldn’t be displayed. Also, it’s going to kill most of the extensions. After that, you can go back into the extensions management and just restart the extensions.
As far as websites go, well… before it worked great. Right now it has created some problems. Basically, you would just reload the websites and you are back in. Of course, same as before mentioned applies. It won’t know where you were in the website or in a video. You basically start over at the basic website and top. The bigger problem is, that for a few versions lately, the websites don’t load anymore. They just show the loading symbol and that seems to be it. Or maybe it just takes to long. The solution is, to switch tabs. You need to copy/paste the links to new tabs.
On the other hand know this: the tabs are not actually dead. So, if you don’t need it in this session but later, just leave them where they are. They are going to be restored, when you restart the browser. Well, as reliably as they would before. So, if that didn’t work for you before… well… but usually restoring sessions with Chromium is quite reliable. Not 100%. But close. Of course, saving the the tabs in bookmarks and actually backing up the application data / config directory for Chromium or what have you can never be a mistake 😉
That should be plenty to go with. The most important stuff.
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