Microsoft Edge High Memory and CPU Utilization

A Microsoft Windows 10 system I was using was performing poorly. Access to webpages was very slow and when I ran ping tests, I found even just pinging the router was showing responses of over 1,000 milliseconds, which is exceedingly bad when pinging systems out on the Internet, let alone pinging a local router that functions as the gateway to the Internet. When I checked system performance with the Windows Task Manager, I found that the Microsoft Edge browser was using a lot of the CPU cycles and consuming a very large amount of memory; I've found it frequently doing so on Windows 10 systems when it is in use on those systems.

In an attempt to determine which tabs open in the browser might be the worst culprits, I clicked on the Details tab in the Windows Task Manager.

When I clicked on the Memory column header to order the processes in order of memory usage, I could see that the two Edge processes consuming the most memory had process identifiers (PIDs) of 12012 and 4516. So, I opened a command prompt window and used the netstat -ano command to determine what IP addresses those processes were accessing. I didn't see any results for the process with PID 12012, but I saw several results for the one with PID 4516.

C:\Users\Luna>netstat -ano | find "12012"

C:\Users\Luna>netstat -ano | find "4516"
  TCP    192.168.0.20:63043     173.194.204.189:443    ESTABLISHED     4516
  TCP    192.168.0.20:63060     216.58.218.228:443     ESTABLISHED     4516
  TCP    192.168.0.20:63061     216.58.218.228:443     ESTABLISHED     4516
  TCP    192.168.0.20:63199     216.58.218.228:443     ESTABLISHED     4516
  TCP    192.168.0.20:63320     216.58.218.238:443     ESTABLISHED     4516
  TCP    192.168.0.20:63321     216.58.218.238:443     ESTABLISHED     4516
  TCP    192.168.0.20:63322     216.58.218.238:443     ESTABLISHED     4516

C:\Users\Luna>

C:\Users\Luna>nslookup - 8.8.8.8
Default Server:  google-public-dns-a.google.com
Address:  8.8.8.8

> 173.194.204.189
Server:  google-public-dns-a.google.com
Address:  8.8.8.8

Name:    qb-in-f189.1e100.net
Address:  173.194.204.189

> 216.58.218.228
Server:  google-public-dns-a.google.com
Address:  8.8.8.8

Name:    iad23s40-in-f4.1e100.net
Address:  216.58.218.228

>

The 1e100.net domain belongs to Google - see What is 1e100.net? 1e100 is scientific notation for 1 googol, i.e., 1 raised to the power of 100, which is 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Google uses the domain name for its servers.

Since I had two tabs open in Edge for Gmail, Google's email service, I closed those tabs. That reduced the memory usage by the 4516 process down to about 1/3 of what it had been, but it was still listed by the Windows Task Manager. I also had a tab open for Google Docs, so I closed it as well, which resulted in a small further reduction of the memory usage by process 4516.

I had to stop working on the system and wasn't able to return to it until later the next day. When I then used netstat to check for connections associated with PID 4516, none were shown, though it was still running and cosuming about 360K of memory at that time.

C:\Users\Luna>netstat -ano | find "4516"

C:\Users\Luna>