Chrome is a popular web browser and it’s no secret that the tabs you open can quickly take up memory. To help you figure out which tab is chewing up all your memory, here are some tips:

  1. Open Chrome and type “memory usage” into the address bar. This will give you a list of all the tabs that have used up memory in the past 24 hours.
  2. If one of your tabs has been using a lot of memory, try closing it and opening it again to see if it has decreased or increased in size. If it has increased in size, then your tab may be using more memory than necessary and you can reduce its use by closing other tabs first.
  3. If your tab is not using any memory, then try disabling JavaScript and cookies on that tab so that Chrome can’t save any data to its hard drive for later use.

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.

The Question

SuperUser reader KCArpe wants to know how he can see which Chrome tab is using what system resources:

Since looking in Task Manager just yields dozens of identical chrome.exe entries, how can he tell?

Normally, I have a (ridiculously) large number of tabs open. If I need to free memory on my box, I would like to choose based on tab/process memory footprint.

The Answers

SuperUser contributor Dennis writes:

Using the PID, you can kill the corresponding process from a Command Prompt / Terminal:

Windows: taskkill /PID

Linux: kill

Contributor Dracs adds in another way to take a peek at the processes:

Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.

Chrome also has a more detailed memory page which can be accessed by opening a new tab and entering chrome://memory-redirect/ into the omnibox. It can also be accessed via the “Stats for nerds” link in the Task Manager.