[Solved] Chromium eats my memory (memory leak?)

zacariaz · 2015-07-16 16:42:05

edit
Marked as solved, though the solutions is not obvious. Perhaps it was simply a matter of updating chromium and or pepper-flash, and perhaps, AdBlock was the problem. Do your own experiements, should you experience the same issues,
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With my new laptop I have less than half the amount of RAM I'm used to, thus this hasn't really been a problem for me until now.

In any case, I prefer Chromium but am rather concerned regarding the memory usage.
I've done certain things to lower the amount of memory used, like not having a thousand tabs open constantly, and such.

Still, whenever I restart Chromium, with exactly the same tabs open, the same plugins running and so on and so forth, I will usually save about 2gb of RAM, which is a lot, and over time the memory usage will raise again, and I'll be back where I started.

I've tried to figure out what exactly is going wrong, but all I have concluded, by looking at what Chromiums own task manager (shift+esc) reports, is that Chromium reports using way less memory than it actually does, at least not after running for a while.

For now the problem is perhaps not a big one, as I have significant swap available, and the memory is freed upon restart of Chromium, but it is still very annoying.

Non standard stuff I'm using:
apps/plugins:
OneTab
AdBlock

flash:
Pepper Flash from AUR

Furthermore I've always got my gmail, facebook and a OneTab tab open.

I'd be very interested in ideas to solve this problem, that does not involve using another browser mind you.

Best regards and thanks.

Last edited by zacariaz (2015-07-17 09:50:09)

karol · 2015-07-16 17:06:48

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FA … _my_RAM.3F
Post the output of 'free -h' with chromium using a lot of memory.

Is the browser or other applications running slow because of chromium?

zacariaz · 2015-07-16 17:23:47

here's a good example from earlier in the day, before and after restart:

before:
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7.2G        3.8G        295M        533M        3.2G        2.7G
Swap:          8.0G        224K        8.0G
after:
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7.2G        1.5G        2.8G        295M        3.0G        5.2G
Swap:          8.0G        224K        8.0

I am well aware how caching works, or at least I think I am, so that probably isn't the issue.

I does happen from time to time that chromium seems a bit... Well, unstable. Like sometimes when closing a tab, it doesn't update properly so you have to mess around with a few other tabs before that interface updates. It has also happened that it freezes for a short while, but it never lasts.

These things could be connected obviously, but I'd expect others to suffer from these issues too (which doesn't seem to be the case), if it was a bug or so, so I don't really know.

Last edited by zacariaz (2015-07-16 17:45:00)

zacariaz · 2015-07-16 17:47:09

Apparently an update to Chromium (and pepper-flash) has just arrived. I'll return with a report on whether or not it makes a difference.

Last edited by zacariaz (2015-07-16 17:52:13)

zacariaz · 2015-07-16 18:32:15

It's looks like it still eats 100mb every 5-10 minutes.

ugjka · 2015-07-16 19:03:11

Switch from adblock to uBlock, it uses less ram

zacariaz · 2015-07-16 19:13:39

ugjka wrote:

Switch from adblock to uBlock, it uses less ram

I'll try that.

zacariaz · 2015-07-16 20:45:08

Did a bit of statistics on the problem, over 20 minutes doing nothing but watching a youtube video, and I still lose roughly 10mb per minute, thus the adblocker wasn't the problem.

zacariaz · 2015-07-16 22:49:35

It does actually seem that things have improved, for whatever reason. It does eat memory, but apparently also clean up once in a while. I'll let it run as usual and return tomorrow with the final conclusion.

Chazza · 2015-07-17 08:04:09

Just doing a bit of googling, it seems common suggestions are to disable hardware acceleration or to disable "predict network actions to improve page load performance". If you're still having trouble, you could try that.

zacariaz · 2015-07-17 09:47:48

Chazza wrote:

Just doing a bit of googling, it seems common suggestions are to disable hardware acceleration or to disable "predict network actions to improve page load performance". If you're still having trouble, you could try that.

I'm not sure how this is supposed to help, as the problem is not with performance.

Anyway, I'm marking this one as solve. Had it running all through the night, with reasonable result, that is no runaway effect as before, so I'm marking this one as solved.

Arch Linux

#1 2015-07-16 16:42:05

[Solved] Chromium eats my memory (memory leak?)

#2 2015-07-16 17:06:48

Re: [Solved] Chromium eats my memory (memory leak?)

#3 2015-07-16 17:23:47

Re: [Solved] Chromium eats my memory (memory leak?)

#4 2015-07-16 17:47:09

Re: [Solved] Chromium eats my memory (memory leak?)

#5 2015-07-16 18:32:15

Re: [Solved] Chromium eats my memory (memory leak?)

#6 2015-07-16 19:03:11

Re: [Solved] Chromium eats my memory (memory leak?)

#7 2015-07-16 19:13:39

Re: [Solved] Chromium eats my memory (memory leak?)

#8 2015-07-16 20:45:08

Re: [Solved] Chromium eats my memory (memory leak?)

#9 2015-07-16 22:49:35

Re: [Solved] Chromium eats my memory (memory leak?)

#10 2015-07-17 08:04:09

Re: [Solved] Chromium eats my memory (memory leak?)

#11 2015-07-17 09:47:48

Re: [Solved] Chromium eats my memory (memory leak?)

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