Chrome Memory Usage under Windows

You can use the Task Manager on Microsoft Windows systems to see what processes are consuming the most memory and CPU cycles. The Task Manager can be opened by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del and selecting Task Manager. If you click on the relevant column header under the Proceses tab, you can order the list of processes by name, CPU usage, or memory utilization. Below is an example of the list of running proceses ordered by memory usage, which shows the top 7 processes in terms of memory utilization are Google Chrome processes.

Task Manager Chrome memory usage

From the command line, you can see details on the memory utitlization by using the command tasklist /fi "IMAGENAME eq Chrome.exe" to filter the list of running processes to just those where the image name for the process is chrome.exe.

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c:\>tasklist /fi "IMAGENAME eq Chrome.exe"

Image Name                     PID Session Name        Session#    Mem Usage
========================= ======== ================ =========== ============
chrome.exe                   38024 Console                    1    391,868 K
chrome.exe                    2624 Console                    1     35,072 K
chrome.exe                   37388 Console                    1    109,488 K
chrome.exe                   49556 Console                    1    271,308 K
chrome.exe                   48248 Console                    1     45,240 K
chrome.exe                   49424 Console                    1    105,776 K
chrome.exe                   44880 Console                    1     68,056 K
chrome.exe                   38628 Console                    1      4,788 K
chrome.exe                   11228 Console                    1     67,736 K
chrome.exe                   44516 Console                    1     42,888 K
chrome.exe                   36248 Console                    1      9,152 K
chrome.exe                   41836 Console                    1      4,132 K
chrome.exe                   49008 Console                    1     14,448 K
chrome.exe                    9264 Console                    1     93,712 K
chrome.exe                   42920 Console                    1      5,436 K
chrome.exe                   30044 Console                    1      5,400 K
chrome.exe                   37912 Console                    1     70,600 K
chrome.exe                   26024 Console                    1      7,260 K
chrome.exe                    4788 Console                    1     82,388 K
chrome.exe                    4176 Console                    1      4,644 K
chrome.exe                   34220 Console                    1     72,588 K
chrome.exe                   34812 Console                    1      8,700 K
chrome.exe                    8800 Console                    1     54,904 K
chrome.exe                   49468 Console                    1     53,028 K
chrome.exe                    9864 Console                    1     38,224 K
chrome.exe                   41304 Console                    1      4,084 K
chrome.exe                   45800 Console                    1     27,792 K
chrome.exe                    6016 Console                    1     89,436 K
chrome.exe                   36308 Console                    1      6,144 K
chrome.exe                   18932 Console                    1     43,308 K
chrome.exe                   31684 Console                    1      5,212 K
chrome.exe                    3744 Console                    1     78,772 K
chrome.exe                   58964 Console                    1     30,440 K
chrome.exe                   63124 Console                    1     26,164 K
chrome.exe                   51020 Console                    1    112,196 K
chrome.exe                   62416 Console                    1    155,552 K
chrome.exe                   65400 Console                    1     57,932 K
chrome.exe                   58048 Console                    1    398,168 K
chrome.exe                   59068 Console                    1      6,660 K
chrome.exe                   64364 Console                    1      8,128 K
chrome.exe                   65016 Console                    1     34,932 K
chrome.exe                   61812 Console                    1      5,456 K
chrome.exe                   63724 Console                    1     45,212 K
chrome.exe                   22740 Console                    1     57,116 K
chrome.exe                   64860 Console                    1    143,160 K
chrome.exe                   51404 Console                    1     35,500 K
chrome.exe                   64060 Console                    1     33,252 K
chrome.exe                   53740 Console                    1     48,104 K
chrome.exe                    8324 Console                    1      7,524 K
chrome.exe                   57060 Console                    1     89,732 K
chrome.exe                   61796 Console                    1    394,624 K
chrome.exe                   64676 Console                    1      5,508 K
chrome.exe                   63664 Console                    1     74,184 K
chrome.exe                   64924 Console                    1     47,488 K
chrome.exe                   61972 Console                    1      5,732 K
chrome.exe                   62724 Console                    1     48,800 K
chrome.exe                   51680 Console                    1     53,892 K
chrome.exe                   58600 Console                    1      6,484 K
chrome.exe                   64192 Console                    1      7,476 K
chrome.exe                   54760 Console                    1     39,044 K
chrome.exe                   59656 Console                    1     91,132 K
chrome.exe                   64524 Console                    1     74,748 K
chrome.exe                   24872 Console                    1     61,144 K
chrome.exe                   58144 Console                    1      4,068 K
chrome.exe                   11152 Console                    1     21,576 K
chrome.exe                   57104 Console                    1     18,804 K
chrome.exe                   63212 Console                    1     43,752 K
chrome.exe                   51016 Console                    1     16,664 K
chrome.exe                   60588 Console                    1     26,632 K
chrome.exe                   76376 Console                    1    139,764 K
chrome.exe                   68408 Console                    1      8,192 K
chrome.exe                   75216 Console                    1     25,148 K
chrome.exe                   71208 Console                    1     17,264 K
chrome.exe                   11272 Console                    1     51,792 K
chrome.exe                   54936 Console                    1     50,488 K
chrome.exe                   69772 Console                    1     50,756 K
chrome.exe                   40368 Console                    1     31,764 K

c:\>

In the example above, there are many chrome.exe processes running on the system. I can determine the number by piping the output of the tasklist command to the find command and using the /c option to that command to count the number of instances of chrome.exe.

c:\>tasklist /fi "IMAGENAME eq Chrome.exe" | find /i /c "chrome.exe"
77

c:\>

There are 77 chrome.exe proceses running. The number gives me an indication of the number of tabs open in Chrome windows, though there may not be an exact match between that number and the number of tabs open. In the three Chrome windows that were open when I ran the command, I counted 89 tabs total for those 3 Chrome windows when I counted them manually. And I've seen the number of processes increase when I've closed tabs without opening any new ones and I've also seen the number decrease slightly when I've not closed any tabs.

If I want to determine the total amount of memory consumed by all of the running Chrome processes, I can use a for loop in a batch file to do so as explained at Checking on process memory consumption on a Windows system. Using the showmemusage.bat script, I saw the following:

c:\>"c:\program files\utilities\Scripts\showmemusage.bat" chrome.exe
4646144 K

c:\>

The total memory usage for all chrome.exe processes was 4,646,144 KB, which is over 4 GB of memory. Clicking on the Performance tab in the Task Manger showed that the memory usage was 7.4/7.9GB (96%). I.e., only about 0.5 GB of the 8 GB memory in the system was available, so Chrome processes were using about 1/2 the available memory in the system.

But which Chrome tabs were consuming the most memory? You can't make that determination from the Task Manager, but you can obtain that information from within the Chrome browser itself as explained at High Chrome memory utilization. If you put chrome://memory in the address bar in a tab within Chrome, you will see the URL change to chrome://memory-redirect and you will see the list of running proceses with their process identifier (PID), name, and memory usage. At the top of that window, you will also see a Browser section that shows the total memory usage for all browsers open on the system that Chrome recognizes. E.g., it will show not only its own total memory consumption, but the memory consumption by Internet Explorer (IE) ad Firefox. It will also show the version number for itself and other browsers. This example is from one of the 3 Chrome windows. Though not the one with the most tabs open, the chrome://memory-redirect URL will show information for all the Chrome windows and tabs that are open. You can scroll down through the list of Chrome proceses to find the ones consuming the most memory so that you can close them. When you close a tab, the memory utilization may actually increase somewhat temporarily.

References:

  1. High Chrome memory utilization
    Date: May 8, 2015
    MoonPoint Support
  2. Checking on process memory consumption on a Windows system
    Date: November 25, 2014
    MoonPoint Support

 

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Created: July 4, 2015