How to Reduce high memory usage in Google chrome Windows 10

How to Check Google Chrome CPU Usage?

To check Google Chrome’s CPU usage, you do not need to download any third-party CPU monitoring application. Windows Task Manager would be enough to provide you the required details.

1. Right-click on the taskbar and choose the Task Manager to open it.
2. Look for Google Chrome and click on its icon. If you find multiple icons, click on any of them and check its memory and GPU usage.

7. Reset or Reinstall Google Chrome

If none of the above-listed solutions work out, your last option is to reset Chrome to its factory settings. Here’s how.

TIP: Before resetting Chrome, it’s recommended that you log in with your Google account and sync your data.

Step 1: Type in chrome://settings/reset in the address bar at the top and then press Enter. Under ‘Reset and clean up’, click on ‘Restore settings to their original defaults’.

Step 2: On the confirmation pop-up box, click Reset Settings to confirm.

Resetting Chrome will delete browser cache and cookies, search engines, and pinned tabs. Don’t worry, though, as this will not remove your saved passwords and bookmarks.

If you want to go all-in, you can choose to uninstall and reinstall Chrome instead of resetting. This will give you a fresh start and clear out any memory-consuming elements.

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Fix 3. Enable Hardware Acceleration

Hardware acceleration helps reduce the workload on the computer’s processor and avoid using excessive RAM usage. You can try to enable hardware acceleration to fix Chrome using high memory issue. But remember, this option is only available if you have a dedicated graphics card installed. Problems can occur if this feature is enabled only in integrated graphics.

Step 1. Open up Google Chrome. On the upper right corner, click three dots and select “Settings” from the context menu.

Step 2. Scroll down, find and click on “Advanced” settings.

Step 3. Go to find “System”. Toggle on “Use hardware acceleration when available”.

Step 4. Restart your browser and see if the Chrome high memory usage persists.

# Visualize memory leaks with Timeline recordings

You can also use the Timeline panel as another starting point in your investigation. The Timeline panel helps you visualize a page’s memory use over time.

1. Open the Timeline panel on DevTools.
2. Enable the Memory checkbox.
3. Make a recording.

Tip: It’s a good practice to start and end your recording with a forced garbage collection. Click the collect garbage button () while recording to force garbage collection.

To demonstrate Timeline memory recordings, consider the code below:

Every time that the button referenced in the code is pressed, ten thousand div nodes are appended to the document body, and a string of one million x characters is pushed onto the x array. Running this code produces a Timeline recording like the following screenshot:

First, an explanation of the user interface. The HEAP graph in the Overview pane (below NET) represents the JS heap. Below the Overview pane is the Counter pane. Here you can see memory usage broken down by JS heap (same as HEAP graph in the Overview pane), documents, DOM nodes, listeners, and GPU memory. Disabling a checkbox hides it from the graph.

Now, an analysis of the code compared with the screenshot. If you look at the node counter (the green graph) you can see that it matches up cleanly with the code. The node count increases in discrete steps. You can presume that each increase in the node count is a call to grow(). The JS heap graph (the blue graph) is not as straightforward. In keeping with best practices, the first dip is actually a forced garbage collection (achieved by pressing the collect garbage button). As the recording progresses you can see that the JS heap size spikes. This is natural and expected: the JavaScript code is creating the DOM nodes on every button click and doing a lot of work when it creates the string of one million characters. The key thing here is the fact that the JS heap ends higher than it began (the “beginning” here being the point after the forced garbage collection). In the real world, if you saw this pattern of increasing JS heap size or node size, it would potentially mean a memory leak.

3. Use an Extension

If you don’t like closing tabs and reopening them every time you need them, then your next best option is to use a third-party extension that can effectively manage multiple Chrome tabs at once.

Using an extension like The Great Suspender can automatically freeze the tabs that haven’t been used for a certain amount of time. You can also unfreeze a tab at any point by clicking anywhere in the window. This is a great way to keep Chrome’s memory usage under control at all times.

Download The Great Suspender

Further, you can whitelist certain URLs or domains so that it doesn’t suspend any important tabs. Plus, you can use additional customization options to keep Chrome’s memory usage under control at all times.

# Identify JS heap memory leaks with Allocation Timelines

The Allocation Timeline is another tool that can help you track down memory leaks in your JS heap.

To demonstrate the Allocation Timeline consider the following code:

Every time that the button referenced in the code is pushed, a string of one million characters is added to the x array.

To record an Allocation Timeline, open DevTools, go to the Profiles panel, select the Record Allocation Timeline radio button, press the Start button, perform the action that you suspect is causing the memory leak, and then press the stop recording button () when you’re done.

As you’re recording, notice if any blue bars show up on the Allocation Timeline, like in the screenshot below.

Those blue bars represent new memory allocations. Those new memory allocations are your candidates for memory leaks. You can zoom on a bar to filter the Constructor pane to only show objects that were allocated during the specified timeframe.

Expand the object and click on its value to view more details about it in the Object pane. For example, in the screenshot below, by viewing the details of the object that was newly allocated, you’d be able to see that it was allocated to the x variable in the Window scope.

Fixes for Chrome Using Too Much CPU

As you can see, it is not always the browser that is the culprit of high CPU usage. We would now discuss what are the possible fixes to that.

Check Chrome Task Manager

For those of you who don’t know, Google Chrome comes with an in-built task manager that monitors the amount of memory used by Chrome’s web extension, add-ons, processes, and web pages. You can easily access it an catch the culprit that is causing high CPU usage in Chrome.

1. Open Chrome and click on the three dots at the top-right corner. 

2. Hover cursor to More tools option and select Task manager.

3. A new window will open. You can see all the processes going on Chrome. Every opened webpage, every extension being used.

4. End the processes or extensions that you are not using or that are unintentionally running.

Disable or Delete Unneccesary Web Extensions

In the previous section, when you opened the Google Chrome Task Manager, you might have noticed many web extensions running in the background, even though they are not in use.

Here are a few problems with Chrome web extensions: 

• Some Chrome extensions are poorly coded, so their processing demand is high despite the fact that their task is not that heavy.
• Some extensions that are outdated might cause loops in the script, making the web extensions run indefinitely even after their job gets completed.
• It is a possibility that you might have downloaded two or more extensions that perform the same role. It might cause conflict among them, causing high RAM usage.

If you have many web extensions installed in your Chrome browser, it is time to sort them out and at least disable, if not delete, the ones you rarely use. However, it is recommended to remove the useless web extensions instead of disabling them. Because, even after disabling them, they might use the CPU processing power while checking for updates and performing updates.

There might be many extensions that are necessary for your tasks. Always make sure to check for updates regularly.

Here are the steps to manage the web extensions on the Chrome Browser:

1. Click on the three dots at the top-right corner.
2. Bring mouse cursor over More tools and from the extended menu choose Extensions.
3. All the extensions would be on your screen
4. Now, look for the ones you want to disable or remove.

Disable Background Tasks in Chrome

Since Google Chrome is an advanced web browser, it comes with some features that require background running; for example, the push notification feature needs to be active throughout to look for the new activity.

However, if you have a low-end system and want to reduce the Chrome computation requirement, you can disable the background tasks in Chrome.

1. Open Chrome settings by clicking on the three dots at the top-right corner.
2. Scroll down and click on Advanced to open advanced settings.
3. Under the system tab, disable the “Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed” option.

Turn off the Hardware Acceleration

Hardware Acceleration helps your system in sharing the processing load between the CPU and GPU. Hardware Acceleration handles most of the graphical part in the Chrome browser like playing videos from Youtube or other sites, playing animation, online browser-based gaming, and others.

Since GPU is better in handling graphics, so it is good to keep the Hardware Acceleration On. However, several users have reported otherwise. Their Chrome browser works better when Hardware Acceleration is kept off. The result may not be the same for you, but there is no harm in giving a try.

To turn off Hardware Acceleration:

1. Open Chrome Browser.
2. Then, navigate to Settings->Advanced
3. Under the system tab, toggle the button next to “Use hardware acceleration when available” to turn it off.

Scan Your System for Malware

It might be possible that malware like Browser Hijacker, Adware, or malicious pop-up ads have got an entry on your browser that is causing Google Chrome to use more computation power than usual.

You can check and remove those malicious programs using three ways.

Using Chrome’s in-built Malware Scanner

Many people are unaware that Chrome comes with an in-built antimalware. You can use it to find out the malicious extension or program that is troubling the browser’s working.

1. Open Google Chrome browser
2. At the top-right corner, you will see the three-dots icon. Click it and look for Settings.
3. Move at the bottom of the Settings page and click on Advanced.
4. Again scroll down and under “Reset and clean up,” click on Clean up computer
5. Click Find and uncheck the “Send details to Google….” below, if you don’t want to share the details with Google.
6. Chrome will scan your computer and ask for removing the malicious application and files. Click on Remove to remove them.
7. Restart your system, and you shall be free from the Browsing Malware.

Using Windows Security

Windows Security or Windows Defender is the Windows 10 in-built antimalware solution. You can use it to catch the culprit app or extension.

1. Search for Windows Security in the windows search bar and click on its icon.
2.  Select Virus & threat protection.
3. Now under Virus & threat protection, click on Scan options. 
4. Choose Full scan and then click Scan now.

Using a third-party Antimalware

You can use a robust third-party antimalware program to get rid of the malicious program that is causing Chrome to use too much CPU.

Here we are using Malwarefox, one of the best security solutions for a total safeguard of your PC against the dangerous malware programs.

1. Download and install Malwarefox.
2. Run a full system scan to check for the infected programs or files thoroughly.

Conclusion

Google Chrome has always had a problem with high memory usage. Google has also been improving browser performance. It is difficult for us to solve this problem completely. When you are struggling with Chrome high memory usage, try one of the above solutions to troubleshoot.

You can close unnecessary pages, plugins and extensions, enable hardware acceleration, clear cache and cooks,  and update the browser. Hope this guide help you fix the problem. If any data loss happens unexpectedly, use data recovery software to restore files as soon as possible.

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