Chrome becomes very slow when switching tabs

Question

During a heavy browsing session, Chrome can become very slow to switch to a tab that hasn't been opened in a while. I assume that it's switched the contents to disk and needs to reload it, but it can be painfully slow - up to 5 seconds or so. It also consumes enormous amounts of memory - well over 1Gb, split across dozens of processes. [Wow, just noticed a single tab with a couple of videos on it is using 350Mb]

Is there any way to improve its performance?

XP, 3Gb ram, 3Gb paging file on my fastest non-SSD disk.

Solution

Sounds like you're right. To be sure, you could temporarily disable the virtual memory and see if this problem still occurs.

To see exactly which tab/plugin/extension is using how much memory, consult chrome://memory. The memory-hungry video tab could mean that Flash is leaking memory.

Is there any way to improve its performance?

• Eliminate, upgrade or downgrade faulty extensions and plugins.

• Periodically restart Chrome (usually lowers the memory usage for a while).

• Try other browsers (Chrome always was a little memory-hungry).

• Upgrade your RAM (might involve PAE or changing your OS).

• Move your page file to your SSD.

Comments

[Admin]

Upgrade your RAM, or open fewer tabs. Chrome will use as much memory as it can, and since each tab runs in its own process, the more you have open, the more it'll use. At a point where it becomes disk-bound, anything will be slow when paging back into memory.

[Deb]

I also faced this type of problems, better you use Firefox.

[Steve Bennett]

Open fewer tabs?? What??