Is Chrome going the same way of Firefox?

Forums › Desktop computing › Is Chrome going the same way of Firefox?

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
80646 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 41029

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#115016 11-Mar-2013 10:50

Only three tabs open in Chrome and it's already using 20% of the RAM in my laptop. Seriously?

Referral links: Quic Broadband (free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE) | Samsung | AliExpress | Wise | Sharesies

Support Geekzone by subscribing (browse ads-free), or making a one-off or recurring donation through PressPatron.

1 | 2

1096 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 273

ID Verified

#777863 11-Mar-2013 10:58

Pretty disturbing indeed! You have to wonder what chrome is storing in all that memory!

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
80646 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 41029

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#777875 11-Mar-2013 11:08

Just closed the browser, opened IE 10, Firefox, Chrome and loaded Geekzone. One tab only:

Let's see how it goes after a few minutes.

Referral links: Quic Broadband (free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE) | Samsung | AliExpress | Wise | Sharesies

Support Geekzone by subscribing (browse ads-free), or making a one-off or recurring donation through PressPatron.

xpd

Geek of Coastguard
14115 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 4574

Retired Mod

ID Verified

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#777882 11-Mar-2013 11:22

Ive got 6 tabs open here and using nowhere near that amount... 300mb total maybe ? Altho, for whats on the sites, it is a tad excessive.

XPD / Gavin

LinkTree

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
80646 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 41029

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#777888 11-Mar-2013 11:35

Ok... The previous stats again, then a second one 30 minutes later. No activity at all at this PC as I was away:

For a single tab, I think it's excessive.

Referral links: Quic Broadband (free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE) | Samsung | AliExpress | Wise | Sharesies

Support Geekzone by subscribing (browse ads-free), or making a one-off or recurring donation through PressPatron.

Klathman

302 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 78

#777903 11-Mar-2013 11:59

Ironically just looking at the same thing on my laptop.

Had a few tabs open but less than 10 and chrome was reporting 1.3GB of memory in use.

I just installed Firefox and added in flash and lastpass and opened basically the same tabs. Quite a difference.

One real shock is that Chrome is open with only the memory page open. Ouch!!!

Firefox actually feels pretty good too. I've already found that my cisco router web admin doesn't work with firefox so bound to find more. Really like Chrome but not at that memory cost.

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
80646 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 41029

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#777905 11-Mar-2013 12:01

I like Chrome. Not so much a fan of Firefox. But IE10 seems to be quite fast now. I might go back to using IE10 for a while to see if I notice any difference.

Referral links: Quic Broadband (free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE) | Samsung | AliExpress | Wise | Sharesies

Support Geekzone by subscribing (browse ads-free), or making a one-off or recurring donation through PressPatron.

Samsung

Shop now on Samsung phones, tablets, TVs and more (affiliate link).

Dairyxox

1595 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 455

#777913 11-Mar-2013 12:13

Is this really a problem though? I know chrome uses a lot of memory, but how much memory does your computer have?

I notice under the breakdown for mine that the 2nd largest chunk is going to GPU. So its part of their acceleration.
Also part of the speed of chrome is all the memory caching...kind of like what we went through when vista came out, and how it ate all the memory it could.

A better test would be how to see chrome releases the memory when resources become limited, and/or when tabs are closed.

Zeon

3926 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 759

Trusted

#777918 11-Mar-2013 12:27

I don't really care how much RAM it uses as long as it goes fast. RAM is so cheap these days....

Speedtest 2019-10-14

Klathman

302 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 78

#777924 11-Mar-2013 12:31

The reason I even looked was my machine was struggling. I've got 4GB of ram so 1.3GB for the browser was a fair chunk. I was sitting at 3.9GB of ram in use so virtual memory was starting to get hit. Since I don't currently have an SSD this was noticeable.

Since VM was being used rather than Chrome releasing some I guess at least on my system that answers your question about chrome releasing memory.

gehenna

8667 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 3883

Moderator

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#777926 11-Mar-2013 12:33

I don't have a big problem with memory consumption - meaning it hasn't manifested any issues on my system yet but I obviously have a "problem" with the fact that it's using so much memory...

What I did notice a while ago is that Chrome keeps a copy of all previous versions of itself in the \Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\ folder....I found this one day when I wanted to free some precious space on my SSD - Treesiize showed Chrome was about 800MB which I thought was odd. Turns out there was about 10 previous versions in there.

I couldn't be bothered finding out if they were safe to just delete, so I uninstalled and reinstalled Chrome and then it was back to a respectable size.

Just checked again and it's back to about 350MB with two previous versions in there. What a terrible way of managing their update mechanism!

Then there's the problem I've seen on a few customer computers where if Chrome is uninstalled it completely wipes out the file associations of several web executables and other related files.

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
80646 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 41029

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#777929 11-Mar-2013 12:41

I have a "problem" in principle when apps and people think that throwing more resources at something is better than actually finding what's going on. Sometimes this is just the tip of the iceberg, pointing to a bigger problem.

If there's a good reason to increase memory in a box I'd do it. We bumped Geekzone with an extra 16GB a couple of months ago, but that was after a couple of years working to reduce the memory usage footprint.

Referral links: Quic Broadband (free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE) | Samsung | AliExpress | Wise | Sharesies

Support Geekzone by subscribing (browse ads-free), or making a one-off or recurring donation through PressPatron.

Quic Broadband

Move to New Zealand's best fibre broadband service (affiliate link). Free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE. Note that to use Quic Broadband you must be comfortable with configuring your own router.

xpd

Geek of Coastguard
14115 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 4574

Retired Mod

ID Verified

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#777934 11-Mar-2013 12:49

Zeon: I don't really care how much RAM it uses as long as it goes fast. RAM is so cheap these days....

If youre on DDR3 it is... if still on DDR / DDR2 it aint that cheap anymore ;)

XPD / Gavin

LinkTree

Technofreak

6656 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 3474

Trusted

#777966 11-Mar-2013 13:23

Hmmm, I might start using Opera a bit more.

Sony Xperia XA2 running Sailfish OS. https://sailfishos.org The true independent open source mobile OS
Samsung Galaxy Tab S6
Dell Inspiron 14z i5

gzt

18672 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 7809

Lifetime subscriber

#777986 11-Mar-2013 13:58

The chromium project is very responsive to reports. Probably already fixed in something coming down the pipe. Report the issue yourself, and/or try it with the canary build if you want to know if it is already fixed in future builds.

Klathman

302 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 78

#778011 11-Mar-2013 14:38

Or maybe not. I'm game to try updates so installed the beta channel and the memory usage is extremely similar.

Great when 8 tabs including Rdio playing music uses less memory than Chrome with just the memory counter.

1 | 2