Chrome 45 Frees Up Memory For A Faster And More Efficient Web

Chrome’s performance has never bothered me, but I know it feels like a memory hog to others based on user feedback. Google’s latest update looks to alleviate that, and also brings other improvements such as power savings and better tab restoration.

Chrome can now detect when a webpage isn't busy with some other task, and use the free time to aggressively clean up old, unused memory. In practice we found that this reduced website memory usage by 10% on average, but the effect is even more dramatic on complex web apps. With Gmail, for example, we can free up nearly a quarter of the memory used by the tab.

By leveraging faster internet connections, you'd think that this could have been done years ago. They just need to send the data the browser collects about activity on the computer back to Google more frequently instead of holding it in system RAM for so long.

We’ve also made changes to Chrome to improve power usage. A new setting introduced in June will auto-pause Flash content that's not central to a website. Our testing has shown that turning on this setting makes your battery last up to 15% longer depending on your operating system, so over the next few weeks we'll begin turning on this feature by default for all users.

Click to expand...

It would be better if they just disabled flash entirely by default, and users could click to enable it if they needed it for a particular site. Flash is a performance hog with lots of security holes, and at this point is almost exclusively used to serve annoying video/audio ads anyway.

There are add-ons that already do this of course, but it really should just be the default in every browser now IMO. The best thing Apple ever did was try to kill flash.

I've had a lot of people call me up with ram issues over the past year. All of them have been running Chrome and when you open up Task Manager you just see Chrome.exe listed 14 times sucking up 2GB+ of ram. That's with just one instance and one tab on screen.

Switch then over to Firefox and the ram problem goes away.

If folks call me now about running out of memory I just ask them if they use Chrome. Works every time.

It's just not about the RAM though. Sure, it's not advisable to underprovision and then have a browser claim 2GB of memory when you actually have only 2 GB of physical RAM. Swapping will happen.

But, like with antivirus software, I have never looked at used RAM as an indicator of performance. Heck, unused RAM is wasted RAM.

I believe the performance issues that plague software like Firefox or some AV software are related to logic.
Badly implemented prefetching, unoptimized rendering code, unnecessary features from off-the-shelf components.

One example of the top of my head - an older (around 2008) version of F-secure. Had to deal with it at work. On XP, it used hundreds of megs and ran horribly slow.
On newer systems, it only consumed like 30-50 megabytes (probably because the newer OS had the required libraries already preloaded) but it was _still_ unbearably slow.

Nice to see them do this though.