Google Chrome Browser Uses a Lot of Ram?
A couple of weeks ago, I got an upgrade to both my work and home laptops: a 15" mid-2012 MacBook Pro for work, and a 13" mid-2012 MacBook Pro at home. I noticed right off the bat that both were more sluggish than I had expected...moreso than our 2008 MacBook that survived a coffee spill. Today, I finally had time to do some digging, and I found that Google Chrome was the main culprit. The actual application only uses about 160MB, but there are several (8-10 at a time) "Google Chrome Helper" processes that run, adding up to about 1.25GB. I've only got 4GB of memory, so I can always add more, but I wouldn't expect to run into memory issues just running Mail, Chrome (just a few tabs open), and one or two MS Office docs. Anything I can do, or should I move to another browser? (Firefox also has some processes running when I use it, but nothing close to using 1.25GB of memory.)
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A couple of weeks ago, I got an upgrade to both my work and home laptops: a 15" mid-2012 MacBook Pro for work, and a 13" mid-2012 MacBook Pro at home. I noticed right off the bat that both were more sluggish than I had expected...moreso than our 2008 MacBook that survived a coffee spill. Today, I finally had time to do some digging, and I found that Google Chrome was the main culprit. The actual application only uses about 160MB, but there are several (8-10 at a time) "Google Chrome Helper" processes that run, adding up to about 1.25GB. I've only got 4GB of memory, so I can always add more, but I wouldn't expect to run into memory issues just running Mail, Chrome (just a few tabs open), and one or two MS Office docs. Anything I can do, or should I move to another browser? (Firefox also has some processes running when I use it, but nothing close to using 1.25GB of memory.)
Most likely it's a bad extension that is the culprit, at least that is the case 9 times out of 10 when Google Helper is eating up memory, I recommend doing a little house cleaning, remember, once you log into Google, Chrome will automatically install any extensions or apps that you had before your new MacBook, hope this helps.
Thanks...it helped a bit when I deleted all but four extensions and restarted. The four I kept are MeasureIt!, OneNote Clipper, Pocket, and Save to Pocket. I then disabled those and restarted, and I'm still getting 8-10 "Google Chrome Helper" processes. While they are not taking up nearly as much memory, those processes (not including the actual application) are using over 600MB of memory. It happens even when the only thing I have open in Chrome is an incognito window. If it really was an extension, I would think the extra processes wouldn't take up 600+MB of memory when they are all disabled.
It actually takes a lot less than firefox on OSX. For whatever reason firefox lags on OSX, yet its iceweasel counterpart never gives me those kinds of problems.