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.



Windows Task Manager - Edge high CPU usage

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.

Windows Task Manager - Edge Details

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>

I then converted the IP address to fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) using the nslookup command.

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>

Related articles:

Microsoft Edge Process Memory Consumption
Date: Sunday October 2, 2016

 

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