Why is Chrome, etc, always hogging RAM?

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I thought this problem would go away if I went from 4GB RAM to 8GB RAM. I also went (not by that much choice) from Windows 7 to Windows 10. It seems that my Chrome, etc, stuff was using about 75% or so of my RAM on Windows 7 and is using about 55%-60% of my RAM (sometimes as high as 70%) on Windows 10, despite double the memory. (Even system processes, that I've never noticed before on Windows 7, are taking between 50MB and 100MB of RAM.) It seems that Facebook, Twitter, and Wordpress hog it and online news sites REALLY hog it (I blame the ads).

What could be the cause of all of this RAM hogging (and no, it can happen with 5 tabs open or 25, though the more tabs I have open, even if close them, the worse it seems to get.)

Is this the issue of:

1.) Memory leaks
2.) Data mining and who knows what that FB, Twitter, Wordpress, etc runs in the background
3.) Stupid ads hogging up the memory
4.) AdBlockPlus taking up extra RAM.
5.) It's just normal and nothing to worry about.


BTW, I've tried using other browsers and it seems that, other than perhaps Edge, which I have barely used, have similar issues.

Another thing I've wondered is if people have become too careless about memory management. I mean, when you could only use a MB or two of RAM, they REALLY made sure that they used memory efficiently. However, I'm wondering, now that we're getting into Terabytes, etc, are programmers just getting downright careless with memory management?

There is a lot more video and bandwidth intensive applications on the web these days.

Probably a combination of 1-4.
Buggy drivers are notorious for causing RAM leaks.
8GB is about as low as I would go with RAM on newer versions of Windows.
If you don't want to go up to 16GB of RAM perhaps consider running a SSD instead of an old fashioned hard drive, that way your swap space will be lightning fast.

I run Manjaro Linux with KDE, I browse using Cyberfox (performance oriented Firefox fork) with a crapload of addons, I have Steam and Discord running almost constantly, and I hardly ever hit even 4GB of ram used. Right now I'm at 2.8GB of physical ram usage with 0 bytes of pagefile usage.

If you wanna use less RAM, Linux is the way to go.

Switch to a lighter Chromium-based browser. Disable plugins by default. Use few extensions and keep almost only stuff that won't allow to track you. Keep your ad blocker because it's much more secure and it increases loading speed.
I do all of the above. I use portable Chromium. It's never been even half as fast as now and its RAM use is ridiculously low. And this on all the OSes I have at home. It's the best browser I've ever used. I don't ever want to go back to what I used before, and I tried almost everything that wasn't almost totally unknown.
Applications have been more and more bloated lately. You can't escape it as long as you use proprietary software because it always has useless extra crap installed and this only to track everything you do and for useless aesthetics. It's only going to get worse and worse with time. So, basically, what mr_bigmouth_502 said.

http://lifehacker.com/why-chrome-uses-s ... 1702537477

Recently I had a problem with Chrome spontaneously opening up multiple tabs loaded with Ad-Ware and crap-ware.
I simply deleted Chrome and went back to using Fire-Fox. Problem solved.

So here is my Judas! I like Chrome's layout but from this thread it sounds like it might be adding towards my laptop's shoddy performance. It wasn't the best piece of hardware to begin with though, and tools like C-Cleaner can only do so much.

Chrome is a highly overrated browser with poor customizability, awful resource usage, and above all, it sends every site you visit and every thing you type in through Google's servers. Chromium suffers from the same problems, and even lacks some of Chrome's better features, like a built-in updater.

Meanwhile, at least until compatibility with XUL addons is completely erased in favor of WebExtensions, Firefox has better customizability, better resource usage, AND you can turn off all the telemetry. I'm considering installing ESR when Firefox 53 comes out, just so long as it doesn't break compatibility with newer versions of the addons I use.

Have you tried Opera or Vivaldi? I usually alternate between those and they have good settings to block some of the B.S. also you can still use any chrome apps you like it uses the same base software or whatever but they just did better things with it than chrome. Basically those browsers are the best of chrome without all the crap that comes with chrome

Chrome spawns separate instances for every tab you open which is a security feature and also prevents one tab from crashing the whole browser. But because of this it uses significantly more ram.

1. The internet is made from frankenstein programming tools, they let average people program.
2. Web browsers are a nightmare to make, they are trying to cope with Frankenweb
3. Sites like Wrongplanet that have a stack of ads that hog bandwidth & processor time, sometimes keep refreshing!

Adblockers may help.

A relative had preloaded several browsers on my PC for me to use. I had preferred Firefox, but a few months ago I was having problems with it, so I switched to using Chrome. Because I wanted to keep doing my usual browsing while configuring it, the process took about a week for me, but it was worth the time. I went thru the settings section to adjust things to my taste, including getting it to not track me everywhere. I set up a different, more secure search engine to use (StartPage, also known as Ixquick), and I went thru the Chrome web store extensions/apps to find browser extensions that would be very helpful for me. I now have several for security and ad blocking, as well as others for other functions. The best non-security extension I found is OneTab, as it tames all the tabs people tend to have open at one time. When you have more than a few tabs open, it slows down, and can eventually crash the browser. With OneTab, you can store your open tabs in an off-browser "closet", that you can access instantly, as needed, and your OneTab page will save your list of stored tabs even when the browser and OS are turned off. You can make tab groups there, and name the groups. You can also move tabs from one group to the next, star and/or lock groups. Because these open tabs are being stored off the browser bar, they use almost no browser resources, so it greatly reduces the slow downs, and crashes. I've tried other tab tamers, but this is the best one I've found.

Hope you are able to fix your problem.