You Can Now See How Much RAM a Chrome Tab Is Using
You have too many tabs open right now, and that’s okay: the Internet is full of fascinating content that none of us can watch right away. So all these interesting articles, videos and memes are put off for later.
However, if your browser is a memory hog, all those tabs could be eating up your computer’s RAM and you may or may not have any free memory. Some new machines, like Apple’s $1,600 MacBook Pro , only come with 8GB of RAM, so every byte of memory is valuable.
Chrome is of course a known offender here. The browser simply takes a lot of resources to be one of the best on the market. But Google is working on it: Late last year, the company introduced a new feature called Memory Saver that automatically suspends unused tabs that take up a lot of memory. When the browser suspends these tabs, it frees up more RAM for your computer to use elsewhere, which should improve overall browsing performance in Chrome.
Now Memory Saver gets even better. Google now gives you information about how much RAM each tab, both active and inactive, is using that Chrome suspends.
How to Find Out How Much RAM Each Chrome Tab Uses
To test, make sure you have Memory Saver turned on. You’ll find this option in Chrome’s Settings under Performance > Memory . Now just hover over any browser tab. At the bottom of the expanded window detailing the site open in the tab, you will see the total memory usage at that moment. Chrome settings, for example, currently take up 54.4 MB of RAM for me, and X takes up 136 MB. My memory saving guide above takes up more than half a GB at 542 MB, while The Verge’s home page is 613 MB. Some sites simply require more RAM than others.
If Chrome decides to make a tab inactive, you’ll see it in the memory report (as well as a dotted circle around the icon). Now you will see that the memory is “freed”. Chrome freed up 82.8 MB by making the Microsoft support article inactive, and saved 129 MB by pausing the Shutterstock tab. Thank you, Chrom!