Arch Linux

zoqaeski

Member

From: /earth/australia/.

Registered: 2009-09-30

Posts: 133

Chromium uses a ridiculous amount of memory

Although they say that memory not used is memory wasted, I'm getting frustrated with Chromium chewing up my system's RAM without restraint.

I've tried executing the browser with --memory-model=low and --purge-memory-button but it seems opening a few pages, especially ones with all this gimmicky interactive stuff—even Google has it now —and my total memory usage goes up to 80%+, with over a quarter of that being used up by the browser. I've only got a GB to play with, and once I get past about 85%, Openbox becomes somewhat sluggish and my music skips.

Chromium's task manager:

htop:

($) ps --sort -rss o comm,pmem,rss -C chromium
COMMAND         %MEM   RSS
chromium        23.8 241380
chromium        15.0 152012
chromium         6.3 64008
chromium         3.6 36892
chromium         2.9 29428
chromium         2.5 25684
chromium         2.2 22888
chromium         1.8 18340
chromium         1.0 10488
chromium         1.0 10376
chromium         0.2  2320
chromium         0.2  2200

How can I reduce the amount of memory the browser uses? Does anyone know where I can find a list of some other command-line flags that might allow me to squeeze better performance out of it?

fraherm

Member

Registered: 2011-12-07

Posts: 4

Re: Chromium uses a ridiculous amount of memory

Sorry for off-topic, but that's the reason why I switched to Firefox. On my machine Chromium was using up to 3 GB RAM.

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,731

Website

Re: Chromium uses a ridiculous amount of memory

OP - no idea what you can do to reduce mem usage.
OT comment - firefox with tabs is no better for me.

Last edited by graysky (2011-12-28 13:53:38)

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nicedream

Member

From: Pennsylvania, USA

Registered: 2009-07-24

Posts: 14

Website

Re: Chromium uses a ridiculous amount of memory

You may be able to limit the amount of memory it uses with the ulimit command.
Tuning your systems swappiness value (/proc/sys/vm/swappiness) might also help with Openbox becoming sluggish.  If your system swaps Chromium's memory to disk more often, then there is a better chance that memory will be available when Openbox needs it.