How to Find Out Which Chrome Tabs are Using the Most Resources

By | March 27, 2017
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

How to Find Out Which Chrome Extensions and Tabs are Using the Most Resources

If you’re a Google Chrome user, did you know you can find out which tabs and extensions are using up the most resources? You can, and you don’t need to be a geek or techy either. Here’s how to check what Chrome tabs and extensions are using the most system resources.

Click on the Chrome menu icon in the top right-hand corner of Chrome;  it looks like three vertical dots… see?

In the drop-down menu which appears when you click the menu icon, choose More Tools–> Task Manager:

Or if you’re a shortcut fan, just press Shift+Esc (make sure Chrome is open and in focus).

If you did all that right, Chrome’s built-in Task Manager will open. As can see below, two tabs are using up a lot of memory (RAM). One is Gmail – and that’s OK… I need that. But Speed Test is using up a hunk of RAM and I don’t need it running anymore. So I can either close its tab in Chrome, or just highlight in Task Manager and click the  End Process button near the bottom-right of Chrome’s Task Manager.

I’ve highlighted two high-resource tabs in pink, and 3 of my extensions in yellow. As you can see I don’t have any resource gobbling extensions.

Now you know how to see what extensions and what Chrome tabs are using the most resources. Chrome’s Task Manager lets you shut down those resource hungry tabs that you’re probably not using.

 

 

 

3 thoughts on “How to Find Out Which Chrome Tabs are Using the Most Resources

  1. Annetta Huffman

    I only have 4 chrome tabs showing; Browser 49.71K
    G Pu Pr 64.912K
    M Tab Cloud eight 151.63K
    Adobe Extension 13,612

    My computer runs very slow and was hoping to see something that would help

    Reply
    1. infoave Post author

      I”m sorry we were not more clear in the article. This article was not about what makes your computer slow, it was about finding out which tabs in Google Chrome are taking up the most RAM. 151.62 KB of RAM is minuscule. Most programs measure RAM usage in Megabytes not KB. If you want to find out what’s making your computer slow you need to look in Windows Task Manager (here are 9 ways to open Task Manager)

      Most computers have at least 4 gb of RAM — for our purposes here. that’s equal to approx 4000 mb of RAM or about 4,000,000 kb of RAM. So you can see that 152 kb of RAM out of 4 million (or more if you have more than 4 gb of ram) is a very small amount.

      TASK MANAGER & RAM

      As you can see from a screen shot of Task Manager, Firefox is using over 136 megabytes of RAM total (approximately 136,000 kb). Chrome is using nearly 80 mb (80,000 kb) and even Task Manager itself is using almost 14 MB (14,000 kb).

      There are many places to look if you’re looking for things slowing down your PC, but Chrome’s Task Manager is not on that list. You should look at Windows Task Manager in the Processes tab to see what’s using the most CPU and the most RAM. And, some of the most important causes of slow computers is too many programs starting with Windows, malware, and not enough installed RAM. That’s an over-simplification, but it gives you and idea what you should be looking for.

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *