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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

I wonder did someone try to dissect where that Chrome memory is going to?

I can run Intellij Idea: Java IDE, load project with thousands of files into it and it won't eat 8 GB.

I understand that Chromium is maintained by extremely talented developers and all obvious improvements were made, so that memory usage is probably necessary. But I still wonder how is it possible. Gigabyte of RAM is a lot.

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Not an exact answer to your question but there are a lot of things taking more memory than you would think. Today websites contain high res images. Well, you might say, 800KB isn't much. But that is the compressed size. The bitmap data is way bigger. All this data has to be kept in memory.

But yeah, 8GB is unbelievable. I have no clue why Chrome needs this.

> I can run Intellij Idea: Java IDE, load project with thousands of files into it and it won't eat 8 GB.

I don't have the same experience, PyCharm is absolutely killing my machine and I always have it in Power Save mode. Sure, it isn't eating 8GB but that is because the JVM by default doesn't have that much available. I had to raise the memory limit considerably to be able to open my projects without it hanging.

That’s not normal.

What plugins do you have installed? Maybe one is slowing it down?

And perhaps run “clear caches / restart” just in case there’s cache corruption

I run it fine on a Linux machine that has 4GB ram total — I’m curious how much memory you’re talking about.

I don't know about Chrome but in Firefox if you want to know, go to link about:memory. Caveat: it's very technical :)

That page ("Stats for nerds") was removed from Chrome ages ago. And before it was removed, it was a pretty petty thing since it spent time and effort on also showing memory usage from other currently running browsers.

I think it's a mistake to think that, just because someone works at Google or on Chromium, they are necessarily "talented" developers. They're just the developers that are working on Chromium. Normal people like the rest of us.

Google has a ~0.2% hiring acceptance rate, which is much more selective than the vast majority of software companies. For Google developers to be "normal people", the hiring process would have to be absolutely terrible.

On a related note, i once came across the notion that free memory isn't doing anything for you.

It's kind of obvious and does not at all explain chromium's lower bound of memory usage. But: if Chromium runs better with more memory and no other process is using it: please take it!

That is what it's there for, after all.

This is fine, until another application needs it. Then it becomes a power struggle for the throne, and both sides lose.

If it would actually detect that, it could be great.

But I have a chromebook with 4GB of ram, and it often struggles to keep a particular set of 3 expensive tabs open because it runs out. It's definitely not reacting to memory pressure by being less greedy.

Your pages might have huge JS heaps allocated or contain supersampled assets.

That's not correct for any modern OS. Free memory is used as a disk cache, so your computer is significantly faster with more free memory.

Well, not as significantly now, with SSD everywhere, but still faster.

This topic always reminds me of the work of Paul Virilio, on how system design often (deliberately or not) impedes our own natural processing capabilities by slowing us down / wasting our time.

You can hit F12 in a chromium based browser and hit the memory tab and find out where all the RAM is going...

Also works in FF.

My Chromebook doesn't have an F12 key.

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