How To View How Much Memory Each Google Chrome Tab is Taking

Posted on Jun 23, 2011 in Productivity, Tips, Tutorials by dee 1 Comment

The good and bad thing about Google Chrome is that it separates each tab in the browser as a separate process in Windows. This is great for isolating crashes which can bring down a tab without losing the rest of the open tabs, but looking at the task manager, you can’t really tell which tab is using all the memory as below:

There is a relatively easy way to find out memory usage of Chrome within your browser. In order to view this, follow the steps below:

Step 1

Go to a New Tab in Chrome

Step 2

Type the following in the URL bar and hit enter:  about:memory

You will see the following window:

Here you can see cool things like:

• How much memory each running browser is taking on your machine (this includes that IE browser that you need for software that absolutely needs it).
• How much memory each Chrome tab is taking
• How much memory each plugin and extension is taking.

It also differentiates between physical and virtual memory

Now isn’t that awesome?

Step 3 (optional)

I actually added this “page” as a bookmark in Chrome to put on my bookmarks bar, so that I can see the memory usage via a single click.

Note

You can also get to this page by going to the Chrome Task Manager (hit Shift-Escape while in Chrome) and clicking the funky looking “stats for nerds” link at the bottom of the resulting window.

Comment below if you like and want more of these quick tips! Until then, I’m outta here!

Tags: Chrome, Google, How To, Quick Tips, Tutorials

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  Bob Aug 7 2011 - 12:15 am Reply

  That’s a really great info! I am looking just the same info for IE9.
  Is it possible?

  Thanks in advance.

  Kind regards
  Bob