I just did a test, checking RAM usage before/after closing Chrome (which has 8 tabs open, three of which are Google apps and three of which are Jira, so pretty heavyweight). It's using 2.8GB

Always reserve about 2G for macOS/Windows and about 1G for a desktop variant of linux.

For example "WindowServer" on my Mac is using 1.22G at the moment by itself.

For Chrome tabs:

95MB static cost per tab; some sites load a lot of data: console.cloud.google.com takes 1GiB of ram for me; LinkedIn takes about 700MiB

Jira, Confluence, Google Cloud Console, Slack and Gmail on my machine consume 4GiB when running simultaneously.

That's before I have things like teams, onedrive/dropbox, docker or an IDE.

I don't think 16G is too little, but I could see how there's a potential there to run out quite easily.

4.4 GB currently for 18 tabs here. Just a few Github and documentation pages open. Nothing heavy.

PS: Then I opened another 3 tabs (of YT videos) and it jumped to 5.2 GB.

Chrome and other modern browsers tune their memory usage taking the current memory pressure into account. If you _have_ a lot of RAM available, why not use it? On a 4GB machine, Chrome will _not_ use 5.2 GB for 3 YT videos and a bit of GitHub.

How is priority of memory usage managed between 10 different apps using that kind of allocation policy?

I have never seen Chrome starting to use much less memory when memory pressure becomes high and I have been monitoring it many times. There is some GC like behavior releasing a small amount of memory from time to time, but nothing really significant when systems starts running out of avaliable physical memory.

I don't think YouTube videos are really representative of web memory usage, because a significant amount of the memory they take up will be the buffered video content itself

I somewhat jokingly built out my gaming PC with 64 GBs of RAM with Chrome as my justification... unfortunately well before it reaches even 16 GBs of RAM usage it becomes fairly unstable before eventually reporting that it's out of memory despite less than 50% memory utilization.

As someone prone to having 3-400 tabs open at once for months on end, no you don't.

I'm at the point of wanting 32-64gb of memory these days, but only because I like messing with huge datasets.

I'm sorry, but you don't get to tell me what I need to comfortably run a piece of software on my computer. Despite whatever utilization metrics are claimed, Chrome runs like a wounded animal whenever I get into the territory of a dozen windows with approximately a dozen tabs each. If I try to do something unimaginable like open a Google sheet and a Meet call at the same time on my work provided laptop equipped with 16 GB of RAM, it's a disaster.

Then maybe it's something other than memory. Despite having a bunch of extensions running, the only problem I have ever had with 3-400 open tabs is the mental effort of managing them.

I'm honestly perplexed I don't have more problems as the machine I do most of my reading/browsing on is more than a decade old and doesn't even have a GPU. Plus I nearly always have 2 messaging apps, a pdf viewer, and 1-3 other browsers running simultaneously, maybe a logging app too. All running on Windows 10, it's not some turbocharged Gentoo installation or anything.

- Use Ublock Origin

- Add the "--light" parameter to your desktop shortcut/script/launcher.

I work in advertising, so I think using Ublock Origin is hypocritical (and it seems is not permitted by my employer's security policy.)

I can't find documentation for any "--light" flag, so it's unclear what that does / if it still works. But I appreciate the suggestions.

I'm curious, what if you try running Chrome's Task Manager (shift-escape on Windows, idk what you're using). Cause I noticed things like gmail are pretty well behaved and just sit there, whereas Twitter takes up nearly twice as much memory and grabs a bunch of CPU time every 20 seconds. If you're not running an ad-blocker I would expect that any site with heavy ads/tracking is impacting performance.

I work in advertising, so I think using Ublock Origin is hypocritical

I sincerely think that your industry makes the internet way worse than it needs to be.

Twitter back in the day had a web page (m.twitter.com) which worked everywhere, even under Links2 with the graphical UI.

If the reason it's "the user can't be tracked equally without a JS Big Brother behemoth", then they don't understand how cookies can be used for that, or by just parsing the user tweets and preferences.

Well, your industry it's generanting the same problem you are ranting at. ADs will crawl down any browser.

Your computer is broken.

My Carbon X1 with 8 i7 cores isn't broken. Rather, the internet browser I use largely for work has issues managing a large collection of tabs that include a few heavy web-apps (gmail, meet, sheets and play music).

I suspect your work is running lots of tracking software. Check the Chrome Task Manager and see if it is that?

It's definitely broken if your 16 GB RAM can't handle Chrome.

How many tabs do you have open? Typically that's only necessary if you like have 100+ tabs open or are running many demanding web apps at the same time.

Unless you have some extreme circumstances, like a plugin that's leaking memory or 100s of tabs, I really really doubt that.