Comment by wamatt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wamatt | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

For me the situation is perhaps not quite as clear cut. On the one hand I'm seeing nice improvements in the large memory hogging tabs. For example a typical reddit thread was reduced from 399 MB down to 295 MB.

On the other hand, it appears all extensions now have a >50MB memory usage floor. For example, the Authy extension was using 5MB under Chrome 54. It's now using 55MB on Chrome 55. Similarly the simple archive.is button extension went from 5MB to 55MB. That's a lot of RAM for spartan functionality.

For the record, I'm using the chrome://system/ page to compare before and after.

That said, it may be possible the additional memory usage for extensions may be a reporting change as opposed to an actual memory increase. Unsure either way.

This might be a side-effect of --isolate-extensions (out of process iframes for extensions) being turned on in M55.

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/chromiu...

Actually, we decided to delay --isolate-extensions to M56 to get a few more features working for out-of-process iframes first. It's still on for 50% of beta users, but no Chrome Stable users yet. I'll send a clarification to that earlier PSA, but that means that it wouldn't explain an increase in extension memory usage on Chrome Stable.

Private versus shared memory from chrome://system. I suspect shared doesn't really matter.

I'm using shift+esc task manager, and top to see overall system free ram.

Good catch. All the quoted memory figures are for private memory.

The shared memory figures in the session test (10 tabs and 15 extensions) were all at 0 in both Chrome 55 and 54.

Oh it's the other way around for me. Shared are around 50mb for each extension.

I updated Chrome after checking the RAM usage, same tabs opened as before, this is the change:

Browser 324 MB private, 83 MB shared

Browser 226 MB private, 67 MB shared

Note that often RAM usage goes up as the browser is running longer. A good test would wait the same amount of time after opening the browser to check.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com